ManiacFather
23-09-08, 21:18
The Unavenged Outrage: The Laws of Nature are Eternal
When we look at the natural world about us, we are awed at the beauty and the majesty of Nature. We view the delicate rosy sunsets reflected in the wispy clouds, we view the massive splendor of the mountains, gleaming and shining in their white coats of snow in the winter, bursting with greenery and the color of flowers in the spring and in the summer, painted with endless coats of yellow and red with the changing leaves in the autumn. We can view about us the vast expanse of the oceans sweeping endlessly, wave upon wave, and finally beating upon some distant rocky shore or some sandy beach. We are deeply impressed with the clear, crisp, tingling air of the desert at sunrise and the coral, pink beauty of it all as the first rays of the sun strike the dry, wind-eroded crags of the mountain. As we wander through an endless field of brightly colored flowers on the prairie hillsides in the springtime, we are overwhelmed with the profusion of colors and beauty and variety with which Nature has surrounded us.
As we drink in the beauty of the flowers, of the blue skies, the green trees, the mountains and the rippling streams, we are glad to be alive. We dont understand it all, we have no idea how long Nature has been putting on her bountiful displays. We just know that year after year Nature rolls through her seasons of winter, spring, summer and fall. We just know that Nature is always the same, yet always changing. We see as spring approaches flowers come forth out of the ground and later begin to bloom in their profuse colors, only to wither and wilt during the summer, produce their seed in the fall, and go to sleep under a blanket of snow during the winter. Then comes spring again, and seeds burst forth into a new generation of flowers and the same cycle is repeated again.
If we are observant there is one outstanding fact that cannot possibly escape our attention, nor can it fail to impress us, and that is the over-riding fact that Nature is governed by laws. The landscape may change, the face of Nature upon any particular area of the earth may change, but the laws of Nature never change. They are eternal, they have always been thus and they always will be thus; they are immutable.
For example, the laws of gravity have been as they are today for untold eons. They will be the same tomorrow and they will be the same all eternity. Not only are the laws of gravity fixed and permanent on the face of our planet, the earth, but they are the same on the planet Mars, Jupiter and Venus. They operate on exactly the same basis in and around that huge star from which we derive all life and energy, which we call our Sun. Not only that but, the laws of gravity operate in the same fashion and in the same manner, exactly and precisely, on all the other suns of our constellation, and without a doubt on all the millions of constellations that reach distances that are completely unfathomable by the human mind, distances that reach as far away as billions of light years.
We have mentioned the laws of gravity. Nature has millions of other laws, such as the laws of governing electricity, laws of governing the activity of chemicals. There are myriad of laws governing the relationship between light, heat and energy. There are laws governing the interaction of electricity and magnetism. There are mathematical laws.
Woven through all the laws of Nature is a fantastic astounding interrelationship, a meshing of all the intricate gears that make Nature function endlessly and perpetually in her inexorable drive forward through the eons of time, forever changing, but her laws forever fixed, stable and unbending. There is not one shred of evidence that a single one of Natures laws has ever changed or been broken.
* * * * *
What is Nature? The broad answer is not too difficult. Simply, Nature is the whole cosmos, the total universe, including its millions of natural laws through space and time.
These laws are eternal. Man has already unveiled millions of Natures mysteries. Today man is discovering more of Natures eternal laws at an increasing rate. Through technology he is increasingly benefiting by his understanding of Natures mysteries. It is fairly safe to say that although mankind will continue to rapidly expand his knowledge of Natures laws, that it will never, never solve more than a small fraction of them.
When we consider the vastness of our own constellation known as the Milky Way, and realize that it is only one constellation out off millions that can now be detected by our powerful telescopes, our imagination is staggered by the vastness of Natures universe. We come to realize that our own little world is only a tiny speck in the vastness of space, and our own lifetime only a fleeting moment in the framework of eternity.
* * * * *
We observe that whereas the mass of Nature is inanimate, Nature is also teeming with life. Life itself is subdivided into many, many groups. It can roughly be divided into the field of flowers, trees, grasses, vegetables, etc., belonging in the filed of botany. Then we also have the immensely diverse and interesting group of birds and animals, fishes, and insects, roughly classified as in the field of zoology. Further we find that whereas the diversity of each on of these fields is immense, beyond our imagination, that each species can be subdivided into many, often hundreds, of sub-species. For example, there are thousands of species and sub-species of birds. There are thousands of species and sub-species of fish, there are thousands of species and sub-species of birds. When we come to the insect world it seems that we will never get through classifying all the species and sub-species that exist on the face of the earth. Scientists have classified one million species of insects, estimated to be only 10 per cent of the total existing. It is interesting to note that there are over 320 species of humming birds alone.
If we look at ourselves we find that we, of the human race, too, are a creature of Nature. Furthermore, we observe that he human race, now numbering approximately 3.6 billion, too, is sub-divided into many species and sub-species, with hundreds of differences in their physical, mental, emotional and psychic makeup. Many of these differences are of major importance, but all of them are significant. Of all the species of mankind, we, the proud members of the [...] Race, feel that Nature, in her creation of our race over the millions of years, has up to this time, reached the pinnacle of her creation. We believe this, and we believe it because there is a great amount of substantial evidence to corroborate this conclusion. I am proud to be a member of the [...] Race and I am thankful to Nature that she has allowed me the privilege of being a member of her most outstanding and most advanced species.
I will have more to say about the [...] Race later, but it is my objective here and now to delve further into the phenomena of Nature and her myriad of wonderful laws as pertains to the survival and propagation of life itself. There are some people who contend that we have now conquered Nature. They contend that man with all his scientific inventions is now above the laws of Nature. This, of course, is plain foolishness and completely untrue. At best, we have partially lifted the veil on some of Natures secrets and discovered what some of her laws are. Understanding a fraction of what these laws and then putting them to our own use for our survival is all that we can really claim. The overwhelming fact is that we are subject to the laws of Nature in her totality just as is any other living creature. We ourselves are a creature of Nature, as are all others, and furthermore we either obey the laws of Nature and work in harmony with those laws, or Nature will phase us out just as surely as she has so many other species, just as the dodo bird and the dinosaur have been relegated to the scrap heap of antiquity.
In each species Nature has implanted a strong urge for the survival and perpetuation of its own kind. It is over-abundantly apparent that Nature urges the inner segregation of each species. Among birds there are, for instance, 87 species of king-fishers; there are 175 species of woodpeckers; there are 265 species of fly-catchers; there are 75 species of larks; there are also 75 species of swallows; there are approximately 100 species in the jay, magpie and crow family; in the vast realm of fishes, there are for instance, 250 known species of sharks and so on. Furthermore, once a species is firmly established, it will practically never interbreed with that of another species of the same family. For example, canvasback ducks may be swimming and feeding in the same pond as a flock of pintail ducks, but they will not interbreed. They will strictly mate only with their own kind, the pintail duck with the pintail duck, and the canvasbacks with the canvas backs.
The brown bears may live in the same forest with the black bears, but they, too, instinctively know enough not to interbreed. They will stay strictly with their own kind. There may be 175 species of woodpeckers, but they, too, strictly stay with their own kind and do not interbreed.
The 75 species of swallows may all have originally descended from one species a long time back in their evolution, but they do not retrogress and interbreed amongst each other and become again one mixed-up species of swallows. No, Nature does not plan it that way.
If this were not so, then all the species would soon be mongrelized into one mixed-up species. Furthermore, the mongrelized swallow would soon breed with the 75 species of larks and we would soon have a swallark. The mongrelized swallark would soon breed with mongrelized cardinals and bluebirds and the whole process would degenerate into a mongrelized bird. The end result would soon be that birds would lose their own innate, peculiar characteristics that enabled them to survive all these thousands of years.
Much to our disgust and detriment, something unnatural like this has been going on amongst the human races in recent years. If it is not stopped, we, the [...] Race, will be paying a heavy price for our criminal perversion of Natures laws.
Why does Nature urge the inner segregation of the species? There is a very good reason for this and it is in pursuit of the law of the Survival of the Fittest. Nature is continually striving to upgrade, to improve, and to find a better breed, a better species, a better specimen. Let us repeat this: Nature is continually trying to upgrade the species by segregating the woodpeckers, for instance, into 175 species. It has 175 different entries in that one particular species, each of them with its own peculiarities and particular means of survival and propagation. Some of them are better than others. Some of these species are not going to survive. Others are better fitted to cope with the environment, their natural enemies, the food situation, propagation, etc., are not only going to survive, but multiply in great numbers. So the answer is obvious, Nature is continually producing new species which will be able to better compete the hostile arena of life against all others. If some are better adapted than the others in coping with their environment, they will survive and prosper. If they are less capable, they will survive for a time and then be relegated to the scrap heap of evolution. In so doing, Nature is ever evolving to a higher plane.
Nature further endows each particular species and sub-species with its own peculiar attributes for its propagation, for its defense, and for gathering its food supply - in short - as a means for survival and multiplying itself.
Some animals, like the tiger for instance, have a number of remarkable attributes in their favor, both offensively and defensively. Tigers have ferocious claws and sharp teeth; they can run fast; they are physically strong and savage fighters. The elephant on the other hand has no teeth at all, and no claws, but he is a big brute of an animal with a tough hide and one of the heaviest land mammals existing. It is therefore extremely difficult for any animal to attack and kill it because of its huge bulk, its powerful build, its tough hide, and the fact that it can, and often does, trample other animals to death.
The rabbit, on the other hand, is a small, light animal. It has none of the defenses of either the elephant or the tiger, but it seems to exist in large numbers anyway because it has other peculiar attributes that more than compensate. It is not a fighter like the lion or the tiger. On the contrary, it is a very timid animal, but Nature has endowed it too with a means of defense, and that is its ability to run fast. Nature has also compensated the rabbit in various other ways, and not the least of which is its ability to breed and multiply prolifically. During the same period of time that has passed between an elephant cow giving birth to one calf and the time she gives birth to the next calf, a rabbit will have had many litters of half a dozen or more, and several generations on the way.
And so it goes. As far as Nature is concerned, there are no good guys or bad guys, there are no heroes or villains. There is only one immutable law: the Law of Survival. Perpetuate your own kind.
There is no such thing amongst its creatures as righteousness, or morality, or a sense of fair play. Nature tells each creature: you are endowed with certain characteristics, peculiarities and attributes, to propagate and perpetuate your species and defend it against all others, no holds barred. Whether deception, trickery, cunning, robbery, or whatever is used, it is all part of the game. For instance, it may seem grossly unfair and terribly cruel that a big mountain lion should pull down and kill a beautiful little baby doe. But it happens every day and this is completely in line with the laws of Nature. One species feeds on another and in order to do so, it kills and destroys. The fact that they may not be evenly matched is completely beside the point and Nature is totally indifferent.
It may also seem exceedingly treacherous that a rattlesnake, armed with poisonous venom in its fangs, may be able to sneak up on a rabbit and strike it with a poisonous hypodermic, something against which the rabbit has no defense whatsoever. it may seem unfair fair and cruel that a fish hawk may spot a fish under water, scoop down from the heavens and impale it for its dinner. Nevertheless, that is the natural course of Nature and completely in keeping with Natures laws . Its a matter of the big fish eating the little fish and the lion eating the lamb, contrary to anything we may read in some mythical fable about the lion and the lamb peacefully sleeping together. It just isnt so, that is just not the way the laws of Nature work.
Implanted within each creature, whether it be bird or mammal, fish or insect, there is a strong instinct driving it onward to perpetuate its species and its species alone. This instinctive urge is the basis of the continuation of all life and it is something that we want to place a great deal of emphasis upon. It is something that we, the [...] Race, also possess, but are in great danger of having obliterated through artificial, alien influences. In order to see just how strong that urge is, we will examine the life cycle of a few species of birds, animals, plants and insects.
* * * * *
One of the most interesting is the study of the life cycle of the sockeye salmon. Probably in no other species is the urge to propagate their own kind stronger than in this fish. The ending of its life cycle is filled with drama and pathos.
The Adams River is one of the vast network of the Fraser River system in British Columbia, Canada. There, on the gravelly beds of the Adams River, 150 miles away from the ocean, are some of the spawning grounds of the sockeye salmon. Another big spawning ground is the Brooks River, feeding into Bristol Bay, Alaska.
Let us start the cycle with the female having laid her eggs in a nest called a redd in a gravelly bottom of the river. Here the eggs may lie for many weeks under as much as 16inches of gravel. Eventually the dark spots that are eyes shine through the transparent cells. Late in this eyed-egg stage the unborn little fish can be seen wriggling around, preparing to burst forth.
Sometime in the winter the eggs hatch. The alevin, as fishery men call the hatchling that emerges, is an ungainly creature with a massive orange colored yolk sack attached to its underside. The sack supplies food for the little fish while it waits in the gravel, developing. Then on a dark night it wriggles forth, an inch long, beginning life in the open world.
It is a cruel world upon it emerges. Flooding, drought and temperature changes in the water can be deadly. The young salmon are the prey to sculpin, trout, yearlings of their own species, birds, even the aquatic immature stages of dragonflies. The attrition is terrible - out of some 3000 eggs of a female sockeye, only 30 to 100 salmon will reach fingerling size.
The young pink and chum salmon move directly to sea. Other species remain in lakes or rivers for a year or two, sometimes growing as long as 5 to 6 inches before traveling downstream. Once in the ocean, they are hard to trace, but intensive tagging experiments have given us much information. Salmon swarm over much of the north Pacific Ocean. During the earlier stages, while still in the estuaries, they swim in enormous schools. As they grow larger, the sockeyes make an annual circuit in the Pacific Ocean of more than 2000 miles for each of 3 years in a row. Then, after 3 or 4 years in the ocean, when Nature has programmed them to return, they head for the home rivers on an amazingly precise schedule.
So exact is the timing of Alaskas Bristol Bay sockeye run, for example, that all the fish, numbering as many as five million, arrive in the estuary within 3 weeks in late June and early July - despite the fact that individuals approach it from at least half the directions of the compass and from a distance of 1200 miles or more. They gather with such uncanny accuracy that the peak of the run, occurring about July 5th, never varied by more than 8 days in the 10 years covered by the recent scientific survey.
Consider the problem the salmon faces in getting home. When its reproductive urge tells it to head back for spawning, it can follow no trails worn into the ocean by long lines of ancestral fish. There are only shifting currents, slight differences in saltiness, and subtle variations in the temperature of the water, none of which seem patterned enough to be useful in steering a migration course.
It is still a mystery to scientists just what the mechanism in the salmon is that enables it to navigate with such uncanny accuracy through the uncharted waters of the ocean. Whatever the mechanism is, Nature has endowed it with an infallible means of not only getting back to the mouth of the same river from which it entered the ocean years before, but to swim upstream to navigate its way through the different channels, tributaries and branches and arrive back precisely in the same spawning grounds where it originally hatched. For some salmon the trip up river is short. Pinks and chums usually spawn closer to sea, sometimes right in the intertidal zone. Other species travel hundreds of miles inland; some battle upstream for months journeying as far as2000 miles from the coast.
Let us consider the sockeye salmon going up the Adams River in B.C. The inland migration is a Herculean ordeal. The salmon arrive at the river mouth in prime condition, their flesh often tinged red from the shrimp-like crustaceans on which they have fed at sea, and oil-laden from a diet of herring and other fatty fishes.
But once headed upstream they stop eating altogether. The stomachs of both sexes shrivel. Through their long struggles against the current and waterfalls, the fish live on body stored fat alone, becoming mere carriers for the sex products which they will deposit before they die. In the case of the Adams River salmon, the fish will make their run in approximately 18 days, traveling 300 miles upstream.
During this 18 days remarkable biological changes occur in the salmon on their trip up the river. Their bodies turn a vivid scarlet and the males jaws become grotesquely hooked and deformed and develop teeth. Eventually he cannot close his mouth. Also the males develop a hump on their back that they did not have at the time they left the ocean.
Finally they arrive in large numbers at their spawning grounds, gravelly shoals where they were born. Immediately the female begins to dig a pit a redd to lay her eggs in. This she does by slapping her tail against the gravelly bottom of the stream. After depositing a portion of her eggs in a spawning ritual with the male, who fertilizes the eggs, she moves slightly upstream to spawn again. Gravel from the second egg pit washes down to cover the first. Over a period of several days and nights of digging and resting she may have dug several such pits and deposited in all 3000 or more eggs, each time a male standing by, ready to fertilize them as soon as they are deposited.
And so the sockeye salmon, in framing red dress glide together in courtship ritual over their spawning nests, or redd. Driven by one of the strongest instincts in Nature, the salmon found their way across the tractless Pacific, eluded fishermen, battled up the river and leaped waterfalls and man made obstructions. Finally, reaching their native waters and having reproduced, with life draining from them, they die. They have fulfilled their mission. They have assured a new generation will be born to again repeat the cycle. This they do year after year, generation after generation, following the distinctive pattern that Nature has designed particularly for them.
* * * * *
What can we learn from the previous life history of the sockeye salmon? We can observe the working of several of Natures fundamental laws:
1. Nature has endowed each species with a strong instinctive drive to perpetuate its own species to the exclusion of all others.
2. Nature has a peculiar and particular program ingrained in the instinct of each creature which it faithfully follows in its lifes program to bring in the generation. If for any reasons, such as natural disasters or whatever, the species deviates from that program, it suffers tremendous losses. In some cases, if unable to cope with the change thrust upon it, it suffers extinction.
3. Death is a natural sequence in the everlasting chain of life, and Nature is never interested in preserving the individual, but only in preserving the species.
4. The percentage of loss and attrition before the species reaches the mating stage may be extremely high, but the strongest, the healthiest, the most alert survive to reproduce the next generation. The weaker and the less aggressive are culled out and fall by the wayside.
5. Practically the whole life cycle of the species is spent in surviving and growing to the mating stage. Then the culmination of lifes whole effort reaches its climax in reproducing and bringing in the next generation, and thereby continuing the endless chain of life.
* * * * *
A great many of Natures creatures are predatory, meaning that their main means of survival is to kill and eat some other form of life other than plants. Under this category in the animal kingdom, we can list lions, wolves, coyotes, leopards, foxes, and hundreds of others. In the bird kingdom we have eagles, hawks, vultures and many others. In the kingdom of fishes practically all the large fish eat smaller fish and in many cases they even eat the fingerlings of their own kind.
Man, himself, is predatory to a large extent in the fact that he eats meat. He kills cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, fish, wild game, or eats the products of animals and fowls, such as milk from cows, eggs from chickens, etc. However, man does not like to regard himself as being predatory since he takes a hand in raising most of the animals and birds that he consumes. Nevertheless, this in no way changes the fact that he is predatory and does kill and eat other creatures of Nature.
Some of the lower, inferior species man, such [...], are even cannibalistic and eat each other.
A distinctive category from that of the predatory class is the group of parasites that infest this world. We have such creatures as mosquitoes, lice, fleas, bedbugs, ticks, and thousands of others that live on the bodies of other creatures, and generally without killing them, manage to get their food and sustenance by sucking out the blood and life juices of their unhappy hosts.
Some parasites, as we will see later, exist among the human species itself.
We now want to take a more detailed look at two predatory creatures, one in the bird kingdom and one in the animal kingdom and see how they cope with the problems of survival and perpetuating their species.
* * * * *
One majestic bird, indeed, is the eagle. Its emblem has graced the heroic standards of Romes far-flung legions of ancient history. Its emblem also stood proudly on the standards and banners of Hitlers heroic Germany. Many other peoples and countries have used the eagle as the symbol of pride and power. It is as noble a bird as ever spread its wings across the azure skies. It is the king of the birds.
The golden eagle is a predator. The range and habitat of the golden eagle spreads over most of North America, a large part of Asia, a very small fraction of Africa and Europe bordering immediately around the Mediterranean.
This king of the birds, so famous in story and fable, is now also a vanishing species, or at least it is now declining in numbers. There are only approximately 10,000 left on the North American Continent, we are told in an authoritative study of the golden eagle.
This bird may be one of the greatest hunters in the bird kingdom, but it may have to range as much as 100 square miles in order to feed its family. The adult itself consumes approximately a pound of meat a day. In the mountains of Montana, 18 pair of nesting eagles were counted over a large area and it was estimated that the average pair took unto itself a territory of 70 square miles. The golden eagle will nest in the same area and often in the same site, season after season.
In the study of eagles in this given area it was found that the average nesting female laid two eggs per year from which hatched an average of 1.8 eaglets. Of those hatched, 87 percent survived to leave the nest.
Despite being king of the birds, eagles face many perils. Before they even leave the nest many fledglings take a fatal tumble from the nest located on some high aerie. Adult eagles most dangerous enemy is man himself and many eagles are either shot or poisoned, or even hit by moving cars. In fact half of all eagle deaths are caused by man, the main reason for the eagle now being a shrinking species.
Eagles work hard to supply their family with the food necessary for them to survive. Jack rabbits provide 37 per cent of their fare and desert and mountain cottontails make up another third. Other birds make up 12 per cent of its fare. The other 18 per cent consists of a variety of prey, including some domestic sheep. Altogether, the golden eagle of this Montana area consumes 32 species of prey, ranging from ground squirrels to young deer, from the great horned owl to rattlesnakes.
The birds generally mate for life. If one dies, the survivor soon takes a new mate.
What can be learned from this short life history of the golden eagle? There are a few additional observations here about the operation of Natures laws. One obvious fact is that despite it being the king of the birds, it is not necessarily holding its own in the fight for survival of its species. The [...] Race, above all, should take good note of this lesson.
Although the eagle is an excellent hunter, it has to work hard in order to feed itself and its family. We note furthermore that the bird, like the early homesteader, stakes out a definite given territory for its very own. It knows that one family needs a minimum amount of territory in order to be able to provide for itself and feed its young. In the case of the eagles, this amounts to approximately 70 square miles.
The most important lesson that we can learn from the eagle is despite the fact that it is a great hunter, is a brave and courageous fighter, its species is vanishing from the face of the earth because of its low reproductive rate. It is obvious that even with its admirable qualities - keen eyes, great wings and sharp talons, this is not enough. They also must have a more prolific rate of reproduction in order for its species to survive. Although the morality rate of the sockeye salmon is much, much greater, the salmon does much better in proliferating its species, because, unlike the golden eagle, which only lays two eggs, the female salmon lays 3000 eggs and therefore has a much better multiplication factor in its favor.
Rabbits on the other hand have numerous natural enemies - coyotes, badgers, hawks, eagles, snakes, and a host of others. Not the least of these is man himself, who certainly shoots and kills hundreds of times as many rabbits as he does eagles. Yet the rabbit, because of its fecundity, has no trouble holding its own against man and the rest of its natural enemies.
Obviously survival of the species entails a high degree of fertility.
* * * * *
The Canadian timber wolf, too, is a predator, but in the animal kingdom. We have an interesting account of their habits and life pattern from a writer and a naturalist, who went up into the Labrador area of Northern Canada to watch the wolf population in general, and a wolf family of three adults in particular.
Wolves are very interesting and much misunderstood animals. They are nomadic roamers as is commonly believed, but are settled beasts, having large permanent estates.
The naturalist found that this family of three adults had a territory well staked out for themselves and it consisted of approximately 100 square miles. The boundaries were staked out by urinating on certain markers around the whole circumference of their territory. Once a week, more or less, they made the rounds of the family estates and freshened up the boundary markers. Their territory abutted two other adjoining wolf estates, but there was no evidence of any disagreements or bickering over boundaries and each clan respected that of the other.
This again points up that even birds, like the eagle, and animals like the wolf, realize the importance of having space and territory within which to roam and provide for their families, and that a certain minimum amount of territory is needed in order to support their families.
Wolves are fairly orderly and lead a well regulated life. Although not adherent to a fixed schedule, they do follow a fairly well planned pattern. Males hunt at night but stay within the limits of their territory. Females usually stay in the den with their cubs except for short trips perhaps outside for water or a visit to a meat cache.
Wolves are monogamous. They mate only once and that is for life. The mating period itself usually lasts for only two or three weeks in early spring. Their home is a den and very often generations of wolves use the same den for raising their families. During the summer the wolves will pull down grown caribou, usually weak specimens in the herd, or calves. During the period when the caribou go further north the wolves will eat and feed their young on mice, ground squirrels, and anything else they can catch.
Although wolves are usually looked upon as being a mean and fierce animal, they are very affectionate and lovable to their own families and take excellent care in providing for their young. They are, furthermore, loyal to their mates and stick with them for life. A litter of four pups is a good average.
From the wolf species we can learn two outstanding characteristics: the wolf importance of land and territory, and unswerving loyalty to its own kind.
* * * * *
One of the most remarkable little creatures is the honey bee. It is particularly interesting to our study because it has every well organized and highly developed social structure. The productivity and activity that goes on within the beehive and outside of it is extremely interesting and amazing to behold.
Bees and flowers are two parts of the same life, like heads and tails of a coin. This amazing creature-and-plant team, co-ordinated to an almost unbelievable degree, is one of Natures most wonderful creations.
A bee is the only flying creature built to carry heavy freight. It has storage space and lifting power to transport syrup, pollen, and varnish. Whereas mans freight planes carry a plane load of perhaps 25 per cent of their own weight, a bee can carry almost 100 per cent. Whereas the bee has short wings on a fat body and cannot glide, it can nevertheless move up, down, or stand still in mid-air. Its short wide wings beat at a high rate of speed with a weaving figure-eight motion. By changing the figure eight the bee can drive itself forward, or stand still in mid air in front of a flower and look it over.
This flying machine has three places for storing cargo. One is a tank inside, which fills by sucking up nectar syrup through a long tube from inside the flowers body. The other two are the baskets on its hind legs for carrying pollen.
Mostly the bee carries freight only in one direction. Outward bound, it needs only a speck of honey for fuel, enough to reach the goal, where it can find plentiful stores of honey ,and refuel. Honey is so powerful that a pin-head sized speck of it will whirl the bees wings for about a quarter of a mile.
The bee is an intensely social creature. The hive in which it lives is like one unit, like one animal, living in a beautiful home, with rows of six sided rooms built of wax that look like marble. A small hive will have 20,000 bees, whereas a middle sized hive will probably have 75,000 and a big hive even 200,000 members. The whole hive throbs as a single life, one unit. One extra large bee that lives in the heart of it all has produced all the bees that are in the hive. This is the queen bee, who slaves to lay up one or two thousand eggs per day.
The work is all very well organized. The bee hive, which consists of combs and their six sided cells, are built by the younger bees under seventeen days old, which have not yet reached the flying stage. Honey bees enjoy quite a reputation of being architects and engineers because they build many rows of little rooms the same size, each one with three pairs of walls facing each other, so that they are hexagon shaped. Without drawing boards, compasses or rulers they perform a job that is well measured, strongly made and is very precise throughout. The cell walls are only 1-350th. of an inch thick.
There is only one queen bee in the hive. Except for a few drones who fertilize the queen, the rest of the colony consists entirely of workers. These workers are forever busy collecting from flowers, building their wax homes, storing up honey and pollen and passing around food.
The queen is a special invention. Other bees work so hard that they dont have time to have any offspring, so Nature invented the queen, who is different from all the others and who lays all the eggs.
To keep a hive of many thousands of bees strong and healthy, several thousand baby bees must be born every day. For although the queen may live for five years, worker bees live only 41 days, and it is the endless job of the queen to replace them as they die off. She spends most of her time walking across the face of the comb, and as she passes one six sided cell after another she pauses for a few seconds and drops in an egg. Her job takes so much energy that she must have attendants to feed her constantly.
When the queen bee is busy laying eggs, she is surrounded by a retinue of 22 bees making royal jelly. They face her, surrounding her like spokes of a wheel. Their entire job is to keep feeding her royal jelly. As they pass the twelve day old mark, they are replaced with younger bees, probably six days old, for this remarkable food can be made only in the heads of adolescent bees.
The queen bee has a fine pair of wings but she uses them only about twice in her long life; once to fly off on a mating flight, and again to fly away from her hive forever with a swarm to start a new home. She can lay no eggs until after she has flown up into the sky with the drones and returned home from her mating flight.
When drones return to the hive, demanding honey, the workers refuse to feed them and they starve. They are no longer needed for the life of the colony, and are discarded.
Worker bees do not spend the night among the flowers. They wait in the hive until sunrise. Since they do not know which flowers will open pollen boxes and gush nectar the following morning, or where they will be located, these intelligent little creatures dont send out tens of thousands of flying freight cars on a wild goose chase. They have scouts who do reconnaissance work first thing in the morning.
Perhaps a dozen bees go out in different directions and scout the countryside. They fly around in the vicinity of the hive in ever widening circles. If there is an apple orchard, a field of poppies or alfalfa, or a garden of beans or peas close by, or a meadow blooming with clover, great is the excitement in the hive and a whole army will be on the wing and ready to travel in a few minutes.
But the days plunder may be some distance away. The scouts may have to search across miles of countryside. When one of these returns, it will tell the others exactly what kind of flowers are open, and give them a compass bearing for the direction and announce the distance to the spot. Many other creatures can communicate, but few can equal in clarity and usefulness the language that the honey bee has developed and uses to communicate with its fellow workers.
We have often heard the expression busy as a bee and we like to compare the productivity and organization of the bee colony of that of the [...] Man in his organization and his productivity. If there is one thing that we can learn from Natures social structure in the beehive, it is that (a) the whole colony functions because of its organized social structure, (b) in order to function colony must have a leader, in this case the queen bee, (c) each one has their particular function in the survival of the colony and when that function is no longer useful (such as the drones) no further food or effort is wasted on them.
* * * * *
Another most interesting creature, who is Natures finest engineer in the kingdom, is the beaver.
Beavers weigh 30 to 68 pounds, and reach 43 inches in length, including their sixteen-inch broad, flat, scaly tail. The hind feet are webbed. Beavers live in the water, and construct dams several hundred feet in length and as much as15 feet high, creating ponds in which they live, and in which they are protected from their enemies.
Their houses are large structures of poles and mud having under water entrances. Beavers eat the bark and twigs of trees, particularly of aspens, which they gnaw down with their large, incisor teeth. Occasionally they will build canals up to 2000 feet long, in which to float sections of feed trees to their ponds.
Like the bees, beavers, too, are engineers and builders and are busy little productive workers. They further prove that man is certainly not the only engineer. In fact, their ability to be able to scout and size up proper streams for their dam building and then to build substantial lasting dams is more advanced than that say, for instance, of the [...] natives, whose tribes have never been known to build a dam. In fact the house that the beaver builds is probably in every way as well constructed as are the mud huts that are built by the natives of the jungle tribes of [...].
* * * * *
These abilities, that the bees have in constructing their hives and their combs and their cells, and the abilities that the beavers have in constructing their dams and their homes are ingrained and imbedded in their instinct and are peculiar to themselves and are their very own. They are further examples of the marvelous way in which Nature has given each creature a unique, built-in instinct and programmed them to perform miraculously and flawlessly generation after generation. Not only is it most miraculous that this instinct, with all the detailed information must be passed on through the microscopically small genes through a never ending chain of generations. Nature is marvelous indeed.
Bees are not the only creature in Nature whose communal life revolves around a leader. There are many animals with a herd instinct who live together in social groups and whose group has a definite leader. Wolf packs, for instance, usually follow a leader. Herds of buffalo usually follow a leading bull who blazes a trail. A herd of wild horses out in the west is usually led by a stallion who takes care of his herd and keeps an eye open for danger. Flocks of geese, flying south for the winter, are usually led by a lead goose who charts the way. The leadership principle manifests itself in the animal kingdom, bird kingdom, and in the insect world just as obviously as in the human social structure. It is implanted there by Nature.
* * * * *
In the above we have cited the life patterns of several species in particular and several more we have touched on in general. In summation to what we have briefly covered in the foregoing, we can form the following conclusions:
1. The universe is governed by the laws of Nature.
2. The laws of Nature are fixed, rigid and eternal.
3. The laws of Nature apply to living creatures just as firmly and relentless as they do to inanimate objects.
4. The human race, too, is a creature of Nature.
5. Nature is interested only in survival of the species, and not the individual.
6. Only those species survive that can complete in the hostile face of all others and either hold their own or increase.
7. Nature continually tries to upgrade the species by the law of the Survival of the Fittest. It ruthlessly culls out, generally before reproduction, all the misfits, the sickly and the weak.
8. In the struggle for the survival of the species Nature shows that she is completely devoid of any compassion, morality, or sense of fair play, as far as any other species is concerned. The only yard stick is survival.
9. Nature favors and promotes the inner segregation of each species and causes the sub-species to compete against each other.
10. Nature frowns upon mongrelization, cross-breeding or miscegenation. She has given not only each species, but each sub-species, the instinctive drive to mate only with its own kind.
11. Nature has evolved for each particular species a particular pattern in its life cycle which that species must follow. This is called instinct, a very important and vital part of its makeup. Any deviation, deadening or dulling of its instincts, usually results in the extinction of that particular species. The [...] Race should note this well.
12. Not only has Nature usually assigned a particular lifecycle for each species, but usually also a certain type of environment that the species is limited to, such as fish can only live in water, polar bears in the Arctic regions, etc.
13. Nature is completely impartial as to which species survives, each being on its own, in the hostile faces of all others.
14. Each species is completely indifferent to the survival of any other species, and Nature tells each species to expand and multiply to the limit of its abilities. Love and tenderness are reserved exclusively to its own kind.
15. There are many species that realize the importance of territory and stake out limits of the territory that they need for the survival and raising of their families.
16. Many animals, birds, insects, and other categories have a well developed social structure.
17. The leadership principle is instinctively ingrained and utilized by many species of animals, birds, and insects as well as the human race.
18. One species, for example a flock of gulls, will sometimes wage wholesale war against another species, such as a plague of locusts. A pack of wolves will attack a herd of musk oxen.
19. However, fratricidal wars among the species against its own kind are unknown in Nature, except for some misguided human species.
20. Nowhere in the realm of Nature does a stronger, superior species hold back its own advancement and expansion in deference to weaker, inferior species. There is no compassion between one species and another, only life and death competition.
21. Species themselves are continuously changing and evolving over the millenniums of time. This can even be greatly speeded up by means of deliberate selection, as in the breeding of dogs and horses. Some species die out. New species evolve. None remain static, but all, including the human species, are forever changing and evolving. Evolution is a continuous process.
22. Eternal struggle is the price of survival.
23. Nature has given each creature a strong natural instinct whose basic drive is the perpetuation of its own kind. Ingrained in this instinct is a complete blueprint for its whole life pattern that will propagate its own kind, generation after generation. A species must follow its ingrained instinctive pattern or perish.
24. Last, but not least, Nature clearly indicates that is her plan that each species continuously improve and up-grade itself, or be ruthlessly phased out of existence.
* * * * *
With these ground rules in mind, rules ordained by Nature herself, we will now take a fresh look at ourselves. We will observe how these same laws apply just as relentlessly to the human species in general, and to us, the [...] Race, in particular. We will explore whether the [...] Race has been complying with the laws of Nature, to transgressing those laws; and finally, whether the [...] Race, at this stage of its history, is on its way up, or on its way out.