me, as is that
of the animal species.

The position of the camel with reference to the giraffe in Africa is
analogous to that, say, of the Catskill conglomerate to the laminated
sandstone that lies beneath it. They are kindred; one graduates into the
other. Whence the long neck and high withers of the giraffe? The need of
high feeding, say the selectionists, but other browsing animals must
have felt the same need. Our moose is strictly a browsing animal, and,
while his neck and shoulders are high, and his lips long, they do not
approach those of the giraffe. The ostrich has a long neck also, but it
is a low feeder, mainly from the ground.

We can only account for man and other higher forms of life surviving in
the highway of the physical forces on the ground that the wheels and
tramping hoofs missed them much oftener than they hit them. They learned
instinctively to avoid these destructive forces. Animal life was
developed amid these dangers. The physical forces go their way as
indifferent to life as is your automobile to the worms and beetles in
the road. Pain and suffering are nothing to the Eternal; the only thing
that concerns It is the survival of the fit, no matter how many fall or
are crushed by the way; to It men are as cheap as fleas; and they have
slaughtered one another in Europe of late without help or hindrance from
the Eternal, as do the tribes of hostile ants. The wars of the microbes
and the wars of men are all of a piece in the total scheme of things.
The survivors owe their power of survival to the forces that sought
their destruction; they are strong by what they have overcome; they
graduated in that school. Hence it is that we can say that evil is for
us as much as it is against us. Pain and suffering are guardian angels;
they teach us what to shun.

How puzzling and contradictory Nature often is! How impossible, for
instance, to reduce her use of horns to a single rule. In the deer and
elk tribe the antlers seem purely secondary sexual characteristics. They
are dropped as the season wanes; but the antelopes do not drop their
horns, and in Africa they are singularly ornamental. But with our
common sheep the horns are sexual manifestations; yet the old ram does
not shed his horns. Nature will not be consistent.

Back in geologic time we had a ruminant with four horns, two on the nose
and two on the crown, and they were real, permanent, bony growths.

What a powerful right fore limb Nature has giv