Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 August 1884 — The Law on Survival. [ARTICLE]

The Law on Survival.

Grant Allen thinks it improbable that, as is often supposed, the extinction of species has been caused by violent destruction by preying creatures, except in those oases where man has been the destroyer. He believes, instead, that most extinct animal and plant forms have really been exterminated by the severe competition of other closely allied forms adapted to fill exactly the same place in nature. As an instance, he mentions the black rat of England, which was once most numerons, but which seems to have been completely starved out of existence by the superior energy of the brown rat seeking the same sources of food.