[Illustration:  HAND OF GORILLA, ORANG, GIBBON, AND CHIMPANZEE.]

SOME STRANGE NURSERIES

(FROM NATURE’S WORKSHOP.)

BY GRANT ALLEN.

[Illustration]

You could hardly find a better rough test of relative development in the animal (or vegetable) world than the number of young produced and the care bestowed upon them.  The fewer the offspring, the higher the type.  Very low animals turn out thousands of eggs with reckless profusion; but they let them look after themselves, or be devoured by enemies, as chance will have it.  The higher you go in the scale of being, the smaller the families, but the greater amount of pains expended upon the rearing and upbringing of the young.  Large broods mean low organization; small broods imply higher types and more care in the nurture and education of the offspring.  Primitive kinds produce eggs wholesale, on the off chance that some two or three among them may perhaps survive an infant mortality of ninety-nine per cent, so as to replace their parents.  Advanced kinds produce half a dozen young, or less, but bring a large proportion of these on an average up to years of discretion.

[Illustration:  SEA-HORSES.]

Without taking into account insects and such other “small deer,”—­to quote Shakespeare’s expression,—­this fundamental principle of population will become at once apparent if we examine merely familiar instances of back-boned or vertebrate animals.  The lowest vertebrates are clearly the fishes:  and the true fishes have almost invariably gigantic families.  A single cod, for example, is said to produce, roughly speaking, nine million eggs at a birth (I cannot pretend I have checked this calculation); but supposing they were only a million, and that one-tenth of those eggs alone ever came to maturity, there would still be a hundred thousand codfish in the sea this year for every pair that swam in it last year:  and these would increase to a hundred thousand times that number next year; and so on, till in four or five years’ time the whole sea would be but one solid mass of closely-packed cod-banks.  We can see for ourselves that nothing of the sort actually occurs—­practically speaking, there are about the same number of cod one year as another.  In spite of this enormous birth-rate, therefore, the cod population is not increasing—­it is at a standstill.  What does that imply?  Why, that taking one brood and one year with another, only a pair of cod, roughly speaking, survive to maturity out of each eight or nine million eggs.  The mother cod lays its millions, in order that two may arrive at the period of spawning.  All the rest get devoured as eggs, or snapped up as young fry, or else die of starvation, or are otherwise unaccounted for.  It seems to us a wasteful way of replenishing the earth:  but it is nature’s way; we can only bow respectfully to her final decision.