The Study of Animal Life

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE STRUGGLE OF LIFE I. Nature and Extent of the Struggle?2. Armour and Weapons? 3. Different Forms of Struggle?$. Cruelty of the Struggle i. Nature and Extent of the Struggle.?If we realise what is meant by the web of life, the recognition of the struggle for existence cannot be difficult. Animals do not live in isolation, neither do they always pursue paths of peace. Nature is not like a menagerie where beast is separated from beast by iron bars, neither is it a melee such as would result if the bars of all the cages were at once removed. It is not a continuous Waterloo, nor yet an amiable compromise between weaklings. The truth lies between these extremes. In most places where animals abound there is struggle. This may be silent and yet decisive, real without being very cruel, or it may be full of both noise and bloodshed. This struggle is very old; it is older than the conflicts of men, older than the ravin of tooth and claw, it is as old as life. The struggle is often very keen?often for life or death. But though few animals escape experience of the battlefield?and for some there seems no discharge from this war?we must not misinterpret nature as a continual free-fight. One naturalist says that all nature breathes a hymn of love, but he is an optimist under sunny southern skies; another compares nature to a huge gladiatorial show with a plethora of fighters, but he speaks as a pes- simlst from amid the din of individualistic competition. Nature is full of struggle and fear, but the struggle is sometimes outdone by sacrifice, and the fear is sometimes cast out by love. We must be careful to remember Darwin's proviso that he used the phrase struggle for existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including the dependence of one being o...