Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/364

348 of the individual vertebræ are simply part of this work of making a better fish. Not a better fish for man's purposes—for Nature does not care a straw for man's purposes—but a better fish for the purposes of a fish. The competition in the struggle for existence is the essential cause of the change. In the center of competition no species can afford to be handicapped by a weak backbone and redundant vertebræ. Those who are thus weighted can not hold their own. They must change or perish.

The influence of cold, darkness, monotony, and isolation is to limit the struggle for existence, and therefore to prevent its changes, preserving through the conservation of heredity the more remote ancestral conditions, even though they carry with them disadvantages and deficiencies. The conditions most favorable to fish life are among the rocks and reefs of the tropical seas. About the coral reefs is the center of fish competition. A coral archipelago is the Paris of fishes. In such regions is the greatest variety of surroundings, and therefore the greatest number of possible adjustments. The struggle is between fish and fish, not between fishes and hard conditions of life. No form is excluded from the competition. Cold, darkness, and foul water do not shut out competitors, nor does any evil influence sap the strength. The heat of the tropics does not make the water hot. It is never sultry nor laden with malaria. The influence of tropical heat on land animals is often to destroy vitality and check self-activity. It is not so in the sea.

From conditions otherwise favorable in arctic regions the majority of competitors are excluded by their inability to bear the cold. River life is life in isolation. To aquatic animals river life has the same limitations that island life has to the animals of the land. The oceanic islands are behind the continents in the process of evolution. In like manner the rivers are ages behind the seas.

Therefore the influences which serve as a whole to intensify fish life, and tend to rid the fish of every character or structure it can not "use in its business," are most effective along the shores of the tropics. One phase of this is the reduction in numbers of vertebræ, or, more accurately, the increase of stress on each individual bone.

Another phase is the process of cephalization, the process by which the head becomes emphasized and the shoulder bones and other structures become connected with it or subordinated to it. Still another is the reduction and change of the swim-bladder and its utter loss of the function of lung or breathing organ which it occupied in the ganoid ancestors of modern fishes.

Conversely, as these changes are still in operation, we should find that in cold waters, deep waters, dark waters, fresh waters.