Here - The Alfred Russel Wallace Website

xix IS NATURE CRUEL? 373
vast world of life ; and we also see the absolute necessity
if it was to continue and develop as it has done, filling the
earth with infinite variety, and beauty, and the joy of life
for higher and higher forms to come successively into being,
and for these forms to exist upon the food provided by the
bodies of the lower. It follows that almost simultaneously
with the first plant-cells which had the power of extracting
carbon from the carbonic acid gas in the air and water and
converting it into protoplasm, the first animal cells must also
have arisen ; and both must very rapidly have diverged into
varied forms in order to avoid the whole of the water from
being monopolised by some one form of each, and thus
checking, if not altogether preventing, the development of
higher and more varied forms. Variation and selection were
thus necessary from the very first were even far more
necessary than at any later period, in order to avoid the
possibility of the whole available space being occupied by
some very low form to the exclusion of all others. Some
writers have thought that, owing to the very uniform condi-
tions in the primeval ocean, the development of new forms
of life would then proceed more slowly than now. But a
consideration of the enormously rapid increase of primitive
life leads to the conclusion that the reverse was the case.
It seems more probable that evolution proceeded as much
more rapidly than now, as the rate of increase of the lower
animals is more rapid than that of the highest animals.
This view is supported by the fact, observed long ago in the
Foraminifera, that their variability was immensely greater
than in any other animals ; and this will serve to shorten
the time required for the development of the life of the
Cambrian period from the earliest one-celled animals.
We find, then, that the whole system of life-development
is that of the lower providing food for the higher in ever-
expanding circles of organic existence. That system has
succeeded marvellously, even gloriously, inasmuch as it has
produced, as its final outcome, MAN, the one being who can
appreciate the infinite variety and beauty of the life-world,
the one being who can utilise in any adequate manner the
myriad products of its mechanics and its chemistry. Now,
whatever view we may take of the universe of matter, of life,