We began by seeking in various manifestations of life a dynamic
principle sufficiently comprehensive to embrace its very various
phenomena. This, to all appearance, found, we have been led to
regard life, to a great extent, as a periodic dynamic phenomenon.
Fundamentally, in that characteristic of the contrivance, which
leads it to respond favourably to transfer of energy, its
enormous extension is due. It is probable that to its instability
its numerical abundance is to be traced--for this, necessitating
the continual supply of all the parts already formed, renders
large, undifferentiated growth, incompatible with the limited
supplies of the environment. These are fundamental conditions of
abundant life upon the Earth.
Although we recognise in the instability of living systems the
underlying reason for their numerical abundance, secondary
evolutionary causes are at work. The most important of these is
the self-favouring nature of the phenomenon of reproduction. Thus
there is a tendency not only to favour reproductiveness, but
early reproductiveness, in the form of one prolific
reproductive.
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act, after which the individual dies.[1] Hence the wavelength of
the species diminishes, reproduction is more frequent, and
correspondingly greater numbers come and go in an interval of
time.
Another cause of the numerical abundance of life exists, as
already stated, in the conditions of nourishment. Energy is more
readily conveyed to the various parts of the smaller mass, and
hence the lesser organisms will more actively functionate; and
this, as being the urging dynamic attitude, as well as that most
generally favourable in the struggle, will multiply and favour
such forms of life. On the other hand, however, these forms will
have less resource within themselves, and less power of
endurance, so that they are only suitable to fairly uniform
conditions of supply; they cannot survive the long continued want
of winter, and so we have the seasonal abundance of summer. Only
the larger and more resistant organisms, whether animal or
vegetable, will, in general, populate the Earth from year to
year. From this we may conclude that, but for the seasonal
energy-tides, the development of life upon the globe had gone
along very different lines from those actually followed. It is,
indeed, possible that the evolution of the larger organisms would
not have occurred; there would have been no vacant place for
their development, and a being so endowed as Man could hardly
[1] Weismann, _The Duration of Life._
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have been evolved. We may, too, apply this reasoning elsewhere,
and regard as highly probable, that in worlds which are without
seasonal influences, the higher developments of life have not
appeared; except they have been evolved under other conditions,
when they might for a period persist. We have, indeed, only to
picture to ourselves what the consequence of a continuance of
summer would be on insect life to arrive at an idea of the
antagonistic influences obtaining in such worlds to the survival
of larger organisms.
It appears that to the dynamic attitude of life in the first
place, and secondarily to the environmental conditions limiting
undifferentiated growth, as well as to the action of heredity in
transmitting the reproductive qualities of the parent to the
offspring, the multitudes of the pines, and the hosts of ants,
are to be ascribed. Other causes are very certainly at work, but
these, I think, must remain primary causes.
We well know that the abundance of the ants and pines is not a
tithe of the abundance around us visible and invisible. It is a
vain endeavour to realise the countless numbers of our
fellow-citizens upon the Earth; but, for our purpose, the
restless ants, and the pines solemnly quiet in the sunshine, have
served as types of animate things. In the pine the gates of the
organic have been thrown open that the vivifying river of energy
may flow in. The ants and the butterflies sip for a brief moment
of its waters, and again vanish into the
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inorganic: life, love and death encompassed in a day.
Whether the organism stands at rest and life comes to it on the
material currents of the winds and waters, or in the vibratory
energy of the æther; or, again, whether with restless craving it
hurries hither and thither in search of it, matters nothing. The
one principle--the accelerative law which is the law of the
organic--urges all alike onward to development, reproduction and
death. But although the individual dies death is not the end; for
life is a rhythmic phenomenon. Through the passing ages the waves
of life persist: waves which change in their form and in the
frequency to which they are attuned from one geologic period to
the next, but which still ever persist and still ever increase.
And in the end the organism outlasts the generations of the
hills.
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