s whose huge ungainliness is like that of a shape in a nightmare.
The plains are alive with droves of strange and beautiful animals whose
like is not known elsewhere." The lion is mighty; he is the king of
beasts; but he keeps his place and he has no kingdom. He has not
mastered the earth. No beast has ever overcome the earth; and the
natural world has never been conquered by muscular force.

Nature is not in a state of perpetual enmity, one part with another.

My friend went to a far country. He told me that he was most impressed
with the ferocity, chiefly of wild men. It came my time to go to that
country. I saw that men had been savage,--men are the most ferocious of
animals, and the ferocity has never reached its high point of refined
fury until to-day. (Of course, savages fight and slay; this is because
they are savages.) But I saw also that these savage men are passing
away. I saw animals that had never tasted blood, that had no means of
defense against a rapacious captor, and yet they were multiplying. Every
stone that I upturned disclosed some tender organism; every bush that I
disturbed revealed some timid atom of animal life; every spot where I
walked bore some delicate plant, and I recalled the remark of Sir J.
William Dawson "that frail and delicate plants may be more ancient than
the mountains or plains on which they live"; and if I went on the sea, I
saw the medusae, as frail as a poet's dream, with the very sunshine
streaming through them, yet holding their own in the mighty upheaval of
the oceans; and I reflected on the myriads of microscopic things that
for untold ages had cast the very rock on which much of the ocean rests.
The minor things and the weak things are the most numerous, and they
have played the greatest part in the polity of nature. So I came away
from that far country impressed with the power of the little feeble
things. I had a new understanding of the worth of creatures so
unobtrusive and so silent that the multitude does not know them.

I saw protective colorings; I saw fleet wings and swift feet; I saw the
ability to hide and to conceal; I saw habits of adaptation; I saw
marvellous powers of reproduction. You have seen them in every field;
you have met them on your casual walks, until you accept them as the
natural order of things. And you know that the beasts of prey have not
prevailed. The whole contrivance of nature is to protect the weak.

We have wrongly visualized the "struggl