The struggle in the world of living forms is a condition of development, growing things are made strong by the force of the obstacles they overcome. From our limited human point of view there are phases of creation that make it look like a game between intelligent contending forces, or as if one god tried to undo the work of another god, or at least to mar and hinder his work--some mischievous and malignant spirit that sows tares amid the wheat, that retards development, that invents parasites, that produces the malformed, that scatters the germs of disease. How much at heart Nature seems to have the production and well-being of offspring, yet what failures there are! in the human realm the deformed, the monstrous, the idiotic. It seems as if all things in heaven and earth had a stake in a perfect baby and in its growth and development. A land swarming with beautiful and happy children should make the very stars rejoice. Motherhood itself is a beautiful and divine symbol, yet what perils attend it! In many cases mother and child sink into the same grave. Then along comes some malignant spirit and sows the germs of infantile paralysis, and great numbers of children perish, and still greater numbers are crippled and deformed for life. What a miscarriage of nature is that! What a calamity, and unmitigated evil! When an insect stings a leaf or plant-stalk and the plant forthwith builds a cradle and nursery for the young of the insect, that is one form of life using another form; or when a parasitical bird, such as the European cuckoo, or our cowbird, lays its egg in the nest of another bird, that is the same thing--life is still triumphant. But when the germs of a contagious disease--tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever--invade the human system and finally result in its destruction, then dissolution is triumphant; all this delicately and elaborately organized matter comes to naught. In this we see the failure of the tendency or impulsion in matter which results in organization--the mystery and the miracle of vitality, as Tyndall called it, and the triumph of the contrary impulse or disorganization, unless we regard the destructive and death-dealing germs themselves as a triumph of organization, which, from the scientific point of view, they surely are. Then we have Nature playing one hand against the other. From our point of view it is like pulling down a temple and reducing the bricks and stones to dust for the use of ants. But who shall say that Nature is not just as careful of the ant as of the man?--which is, of course, a distasteful bit of news to the man.