Abstract
John Stuart Mill wrote these words before Darwin’s work on natural selection had become widely known. With the subsequent ascendancy of evolutionary theory, the picture of nature as “red in tooth and claw” seems to have become still more pronounced. Yet as Curtis (Chapter 3) discusses in this volume, the writing of Henry Drummond (1894, 19) suggests that, by the close of the nineteenth century, the Darwinian notion that life is characterized by incessant struggle was often unduly emphasized: “The final result is a picture of Nature wholly painted in shadow—a picture so dark as to be a challenge