"tigers and hyaenas, vultures and sharks, ferrets and polecats, wasps
and spiders, puff-adders and skunks" might have turned their undoubted
abilities in other more desirable directions.[20] Again, "it is the
perpetual effort, generation after generation, through long ages, to
repair the mischief inflicted by enemies," that accounts for "the
fecundity of the codfish and other creatures. The more prolific it
becomes, the more enemies it can feed; and the more they multiply, the
more prolific it grows." A vicious circle indeed! Even "earthquakes,
storms, droughts, deluges," are explained as due to a certain want of
balance and failure in adjustment.[21]

Certainly, if we had to choose between the idea {67} of a careless or
indifferent God, and the belief in a God who has given us ample proofs
of a generally beneficent purpose, but who has, for reasons of the
meaning of which we as yet can have only the vaguest conceptions,
allowed Himself to be hindered and thwarted on the way to His goal,
with results of suffering to Himself even greater than those endured by
His creatures; if these were the alternatives before us, there can
scarcely be one of us who would hesitate to say towards which of them
his reason and conscience would confidently point him.

[1] _Origin of Species_, Chap. III.

[2] _Life and Letters_.

[3] _Thoughts on Religion_, pp. 92, f.

[4] p. 94.

[5] _Life and Letters_, I., p. 309.

[6] Address by Sir Frederick Treves at the Edinburgh Philosophical
Institution, October, 1905.

[7] p. 380.

[8] p. 377.

[9] p. 381.

[10] p. 375.

[11] p. 383.

[12] p. 377. Among the illustrations that have been adduced of the
insensibility of the lower organisms, none perhaps is more
extraordinary than this: "A crab will continue to eat, and apparently
relish, a smaller crab while being itself slowly devoured by a larger
one!"--(Transactions of Victoria Institute, Vol. XXV., p. 257).

[13] p. 384.

[14] William Allingham's _Diary_, p. 226.

[15] In 1896, by Messrs. Macmillan.

[16] In one instance, at least, Darwin had pictured in his imagination
the steps by which a "strange and odious instinct" may have been
developed from comparatively innocent beginnings. He was referring to
the ejection by the young cuckoo of its companions from the nest. "I
can see no special difficulty in its having gradually acquired, during
successive generations, the blind desire, the strength and structure
neces