INSECTS
The germ cells accompanying each new soma undergo a series of transformations within the parent body before they themselves are capable of accomplishing their purpose. They multiply enormously. With some animals, only a few of them ever produce new members of the race; but with insects, whose motto is "safety in numbers," each species produces every season a great abundance of new individuals, to the end that the many forces arrayed against them may not bring about their extermination.
The world seems full of forces opposed to organized life. But the truth is, all organization is an opposition to established forces. The reason that the forms of life now existing have held their places in nature is that they have found and perfected ways and means of opposing, for a time, the forces that tend to the dissipation of energy. Life is a revolt against inertia. Those species that have died out are extinct, either because they came to the end of their resources, or because they became so inflexibly adapted to a certain kind of life that they were unable to meet the emergency of a change in the conditions that made this life possible. Efficiency in the ordinary means of living, rather than specialization for a particular way of living, appears to be the best guarantee of continued existence.
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