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Show 266. "how many mouths Nature has to fill, how many neighbors we have, how little we know about them, and how seldom we get in each other's way!" He suspected that gratuitous violence was an exception, not a rule, and in any case was part of a larger plan which Man did not understand. He finally refused to judge the ethics of Nature in human terms. In his refusal was the personal recognition that seeing "Nature red in tooth and claw" would disrupt his own peace. After all, he began his meditation by claiming that he was satisfied with a "good practical sort of immortality." To think long on death and destruction was also to deface this pleasing if somewhat dreamy illusion. I am reminded of Melville's masthead. Muir chose to go through life a dreamer, rather than spend his time clutching at the mast. He suspected, in any case, that he had precipitated the violence by invading the ant's realm. After all, an imperialistic animal like Man was constantly intruding on environments which were already satisfactorily occupied, sometimes without even knowing it. STRUGGLE AND ADAPTATION Muir was not alone in his blindness toward population dynamics. The expanding America of the late nineteenth century was not receptive to Maithus' thesis that population increased faster than food supply- As a result, American Darwinists did not like to emphasize the struggle for an insufficient |