The case of the flies is plain enough. The Maori and the English fly live on the same food, and require about the same amount of warmth and moisture: the one which is best fitted to the common conditions will gain the day, and drive out the other. The English fly has had to contend not only against other English flies, but against every fly of temperate climates: we having traded with every land, and brought the flies of every clime to England. The English fly is the best possible fly of the whole world, and will naturally beat down and exterminate, or else starve out, the merely provincial Maori fly. If a great singer--to find whom for the London stage the world has been ransacked--should be led by the foible of the moment to sing for gain in an unknown village, where on the same night a rustic tenor was attempting to sing his best, the London tenor would send the provincial supperless to bed. So it is with the English and Maori fly. Natural selection is being conducted by nature in New Zealand on a grander scale than any we have contemplated, for the object of it here is man. In America, in Australia, the white man shoots or poisons his red or black fellow, and exterminates him through the workings of superior knowledge; but in New Zealand it is peacefully, and without extraordinary advantages, that the Pakéha beats his Maori brother. That which is true of our animal and vegetable productions is true also of our man. The English fly, grass, and man, they and their progenitors before them, have had to fight for life against their fellows. The Englishman, bringing into his country from the parts to which he trades all manner of men, of grass seeds, and of insect germs, has filled his land with every kind of living thing to which his soil or climate will afford support. Both old inhabitants and interlopers have to maintain a struggle which at once crushes and starves out of life every weakly plant, man, or insect, and fortifies the race by continual buffetings. The plants of civilized man are generally those which will grow best in the greatest variety of soils and climates; but in any case, the English fauna and flora are peculiarly fitted to succeed at our antipodes, because the climates of Great Britain and New Zealand are almost the same, and our men, flies, and plants--the “pick” of the whole world--have not even to encounter the difficulties of acclimatization in their struggle against the weaker growths indigenous to the soil.