That the competition of organisms, animal and vegetable, for nourishment and for protection may favour certain types, and depress or even exterminate others, is of course indisputable. We see it when the Japanese worker and the Californian meet in industrial rivalry on the Pacific slopes—we see it when the willows planted by New Zealand rivers destroy the weed which infested them, by absorbing the nourishment from the river-bed on which it lived.[75] What we have to consider, however, is the efficacy of competition in giving predominance and permanence to a type differing but slightly in the initial stages from that of the rest of the species, and differing but in a very few individuals. We have to consider, in fact, whether natural selection is not a consequence rather than a cause of evolution. On no mechanical theory of evolution can we suppose that the first leaf-markings of the butterfly, _Kallima paralecta_, were either at all pronounced in their mimicry, or that they originated simultaneously in any large group of the original species from which _Kallima paralecta_ sprang. Therefore, with very small advantage in the way of protection from enemies, and with the constant and powerful influence of intercrossing ever tending to obliterate the distinctive leaf-marks, how could natural selection alone enable the new, the mimicking type, to assert and develop itself, as it has done not only in this particular species of butterfly but in hundreds of species of the _Lepidoptera_ and other insects? “A considerable initial resemblance,” writes Mr. Beddard in his most valuable though somewhat chaotic work on this subject,[76] “may be fairly set down to other causes [than natural selection]; because it is impossible to believe that a slight move in the required direction would be of sufficient importance to serve as material for the action of natural elimination.” The most convinced Darwinian will hardly deny that the problem involved in this case is a serious one.