F. You are right. But a man of science may be a man of other things
besides science, and though he may have, and ought to have no heart
during a scientific investigation, yet when he has once come to a
conclusion he may be hearty enough in support of it, and in his other
capacities may be of as warm a temperament as even you can desire.
C. I tell you I do not like the book.
F. May I catechise you a little upon it?
C. To your heart's content.
F. Firstly, then, I will ask you what is the one great impression
that you have derived from reading it; or, rather, what do you think
to be the main impression that Darwin wanted you to derive?
C. Why, I should say some such thing as the following - that men are
descended from monkeys, and monkeys from something else, and so on
back to dogs and horses and hedge-sparrows and pigeons and cinipedes
(what is a cinipede?) and cheesemites, and then through the plants
down to duckweed.
F. You express the prevalent idea concerning the book, which as you
express it appears nonsensical enough.
C. How, then, should you express it yourself?
F. Hand me the book and I will read it to you through from beginning
to end, for to express it more briefly than Darwin himself has done
is almost impossible.
C. That is nonsense; as you asked me what impression I derived from
the book, so now I ask you, and I charge you to answer me.
F. Well, I assent to the justice of your demand, but I shall comply
with it by requiring your assent to a few principal statements
deducible from the work.
C. So be it.
F. You will grant then, firstly, that all plants and animals
increase very rapidly, and that unless they were in some manner
checked, the world would soon be overstocked. Take cats, for
instance; see with what rapidity they breed on the different runs in
this province where there is little or nothing to check them; or even
take the more slowly breeding sheep, and see how soon 500 ewes become
5000 sheep under favourable circumstances. Suppose this sort of
thing to go on for a hundred million years or so, and where would be
the standing room for all the different plants and animals that would
be now existing, did they not materially check each other's increase,
or were they not liable in some way to be checked by other causes?
Remember the quail; how plentiful they were until the cats came with
the settlers from Europe. Why were they so abundant? Simply because
they had plenty to eat, and could get sufficient shelter from the
hawks to multiply freely. The cats came, and tussocks stood the poor
little creatures in but poor stead. The cats increased and
multiplied because they had plenty of food and no natural enemy to
check them.
