Winners in Life's Race

Life, life, everywhere life! This was the cry with which we began our history of the lowest forms of Life’s children, and although we did not then pass on to the higher animals, is it not true that before we reached the end we were overwhelmed with the2 innumerable forms of living beings? The microscopic lime and flint builders, the spreading sponges, the hydras, anemones, corals, and jelly-fish filled the waters; the star-fish, sea-urchins, crabs, and lobsters crowded the shores; the oysters, whelks, and periwinkles, with their hundreds of companions, struggled for their existence between the tides; while in the open sea thousands of crustaceans and molluscs, with cuttle-fish and terribly-armed calamaries, roamed in search of food. Upon the land the snails and slugs devoured the green foliage, while the vast army of insects filled every nook and cranny in the water, on the land, or in the air. Yes! even among these lower forms we found creatures enough to stock the world over and over again with abundant life, so that even if the octopus had remained the monarch of the sea, and the tiny ant the most intelligent ruler on the land, there would have been no barren space, no uninhabited tracts, except those burning deserts and frozen peaks where life can scarcely exist.

Yet though the world might have been full of these creatures, they would not have been able to make the fullest use of it, for all animal life would have been comparatively insignificant and feeble, each creature moving within a very narrow range, and having but small powers of enjoyment or activity. With the exception of the insects, by far the greater number would, during their whole lives, never wander more than a few yards from one spot, while, though the locust and the butterfly make long journeys, yet the bees and beetles, dragon-flies and ants, would not cross many miles of ground in several generations.

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What a curious world that would have been in which the stag-beetle and the atlas-moth could boast of being the largest land animals, except where perhaps some monster land snail might bear them company; while cuttle-fish and calamaries would have been the rulers of the sea, and the crabs and lobsters of the shores! A strangely silent world too. The grasshopper’s chirp as he rubbed his wings together, the hum of the bee, the click of the sharp jaws of the grub of the stag-beetle, eating away the trunk of some old oak tree, would have been among the loudest sounds to be heard; and though there would have been plenty of marvellous beauty among the metallic-winged beetles, the butterflies, and the delicate forms of the sea, yet amid all this lovely life we should seek in vain for any intelligent faces,—for what expression could there be in the fixed and many-windowed eye of the ant or beetle, or in the stony face of the crab?

These lower forms, however, were not destined to have all the world to themselves, for in ages, so long ago that we cannot reckon them, another division of Life’s children had begun to exist which possessed advantages giving it the power to press forward far beyond the star-fish, the octopus, or the insect. This was the Backboned division, to which belong the fish of our seas and rivers; the frogs and toads, snakes, lizards, crocodiles, and tortoises; the birds of all kinds and sizes; the kangaroos; the rats, pigs, elephants, lions, whales, seals, and monkeys.