Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/78

68 mean by nature only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, — and by laws only the ascertained sequence of events." *

Some of the laws in nature, to which Darwin here refers are now as thoroughly appreciated and understood as are the facts in physics and astronomy. We no longer believe with the author of Genesis in the Christian bible that the earth is flat, and the sky a perforated crystal to allow the rain to come through, or that the rainbow was ever placed in the heavens for any reason whatever. We know much better than all this amounts to, and we know, too, that we have no power to alter any of the natural laws or the absolute conditions existing in life. We often hear it said that it is foolish for man to " tamper with nature," and thus cause variability in forms, or change in conditions that may militate against his interest or do harm in other ways. To this extent alone can man tamper or interfere with nature, but this by no means implies that he can either cause variability in animal or plant forms or check or prevent it in its operation. The struggle for existence commenced as a law with the first spark of life on earth, and it has never ceased since, nor will it cease in its operation until every evidence of life in the world is absolutely extinct. So, too, with all the natural laws, as heredity, variability, natural selection, and others. They all came into force as life and form, however elementary, first appeared in the world, and they will never cease to act so long as living forms of any kind, either animal or vegetable, are in existence through which they may be exemplified. All that man can accomplish is

1, p. 17.
 * Darwin, C, Animals and Plants under Domestication, Vol.