Some Natural-History Doubts and
Conclusions
IN observing the ways of nature how prone we are to read our own thoughts into what we see; to make the animals rational because they do rational things; to make them human because they show human traits! We even ascribe intelligence to the trees because they at times do things which, paralleled in man, would indicate intelligence. Behold the wild apple-tree, and the red thorn-tree in the pasture as described by Thoreau, how they triumph over the cattle that year after year browse them down. Something almost like human tactics is suggested. The cropped and bruised tree spreads, not being allowed to shoot upward—spreads more and more laterally, thus pushing its enemies farther and farther away, till, presently, a shoot starts up from the top of the thorny, knotted cone, and in one season, protected by this cheval-de-frise, attains a height beyond the reach of the cattle, and the victory is won. Now the whole push of the large root system goes into its central shoot and the tree is rapidly developed.
It almost looks like a well-laid scheme on the part of the tree to defeat its enemies. But see how inevitable the whole process is. Check the direct flow of a current and it will flow out at the sides; check the side issues and they will push out on their sides, and so on. The tree or seedling does the same. The more it is cropped, the more it branches and rebranches, pushing out laterally as its vertical growth is checked, till it has surrounded the central stalk on all sides with a dense thorny hedge. Then this stalk is no longer cropped, and it leads the tree upward. The lateral branches are starved, and in a few years the tree stands with little or no evidence of the ordeal it has passed through. Was this a survival of the fittest? No; it was the survival of the most lucky; the one shoot the cattle could not reach made the tree. May not something like this have played a part in the origin of the species, and the luckiest instead of the fittest have survived?
Nature strives in all directions; the indwelling force pushes out all around the circle, or on all sides of the sphere, and at some point is successful and a new step is taken. But think of the failures or abortive attempts. In some cases they help along the final success; in others they do not. The seedlings that fail in the forest do not help the ones that become trees; they simply give way to them or are crowded out by them; that is competition and a survival of the strongest and luckiest. In human progress the failure of one man often points out the road of success to another, as in many mechanical inventions.
Some of our wild birds have changed their habits of nesting, coming from the woods and the rocks to the protection of our buildings. The phœbe-bird and the cliff-swallow are marked examples. We ascribe the change to the birds' intelligence, but to my mind it only shows their natural adaptiveness. Take the cliff-swallow, for instance; it has largely left the cliffs for the eaves of our buildings. How naturally and instinctively this change has come about. In an open farming country insect life is much more varied and abundant than in a wild unsettled country. This greater food-supply naturally attracts the swallows. Then the protecting eaves of the buildings would stimulate their nesting instincts. The abundance of mud along the highways and other places would also no doubt have its effect, and the birds would adopt the new sites as a matter of course. Or
