of gorse, contended with one another for possession of the scanty surface soil; they fought against the droughts of summer, the frosts of winter, and the furious gales, which swept with unbroken force, now from the Atlantic, and now from the North Sea, at all times of the year; they filled up, as they best might, the gaps made in their ranks by all sorts of overground and underground ravagers.  One year with another, an average population, the floating balance of the unceasing struggle for existence among the indigenous plants, maintained itself.  It is as little to be doubted that an essentially similar state of nature prevailed in this region for many thousand years before the coming of Caesar; and there is no assignable reason for denying that it might continue to exist through an equally prolonged futurity except for the intervention of man.”

This present state of nature, he explained, is only a fleeting phase of a process that has gone on for millions of years.  Under the thin layer of soil are the chalk cliffs, hundreds of feet thick and witnesses of the entirely different phases of the struggle that went on while the cliffs were being formed at the bottom of the chalk sea, when the vegetation of the nearest land was as different from the existing vegetation as that is different from the trees and flowers of an African forest.

“Before the deposition of the chalk, a vastly longer period elapsed, throughout which it is easy to follow the traces of the same process of ceaseless modification and of the same internecine struggle for existence of living things; and when we can go no further back, it is not because there is any reason to think we have reached the beginning, but because the trail of the most ancient life remains hidden or has become obliterated.”

The state of nature, then, is a fleeting and impermanent process.

“That which endures is not one or other association of living forms, but the process of which the Cosmos is the product and of which these are among the transitory expressions.  And in the living world, one of the most characteristic features of this cosmic process is the struggle for existence, the competition of each with all, the result of which is the selection, that is to say, the survival of those forms which, on the whole, are best adapted to the conditions which at any period obtain; and which are, therefore, in that respect, and only in that respect, the fittest.  The acme reached by the cosmic process in the vegetation of the Downs is seen in the turf with its weeds and gorse.  Under the conditions, they have come out of the struggle victorious; and, by surviving, have proved that they are the fittest to survive.”

For three or four years, the state of nature in a small portion of the Downs surrounding Huxley’s house had been put an end to by the intervention of man.