Rensselaer Republican, Volume 15, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 May 1883 — Life and Death in Nature. [ARTICLE]

Life and Death in Nature.

For some inscrutable reason, which she has yet given no hint of-revealing, nature is wonderfully wasteful in the way of generation. She creates a thousand where she intends to make use of one. Impelled by instinct, the female cod casts millions of eggs upon the waters, expecting them to return after many days as troops of interesting offspring. Instead, half of the e«nbryotic gadi are almost immediately devoured by spawn-eaters, hundreds of thousands perish in incubation, hundreds of thousands more succumb to the perils attending ichthyi infancy, leaving but a few score to attain adult usefulness, and pass an honorable old age, with the fragrance of a well-spent life in a country grocery. The oak showers down ten thousand acorns, each capable of producing a tree. Three-fourths of them are‘straightway diverted from their arboreal intent, through conversion into food by the provident squirrel and improvident hog. Great numbers ‘rot uselessly on the ground, and the few hundreds that finally succeed in germinating grow up in a dense thicket, where at last the strongest smothers out all the rest, like an oaken Othello in a harem of quercine Desdemonas. This is the law of life, animal as well as vegetable. From the humble hyssop on the wall to the towering cedar of Lebanon—from the meek and lowly amoeba, which has no more character or individuality than any other pin-point of jelly, to the lordly tyrant, man, the rule is inevitable and invariable. Life is sown broadcast, only to be followed almost immediately by a destruction almost as sweeping. Nature creates by the million, apparently that she may destroy by the myriad. She gives life one instant, only, that she may snatch it away the next. The main difference is that the higher we ascend the less lavish the creation, and the less sweeping the destruction. Thus, while probably but one fish in a thousand reaches maturity, of every 1,000 children born 604 attain adult age. That is, nature flings aside 999 out of every 1,000 fishes as useless for her purposes and two out ,of every five human beings.—Winnipeg- Times.