On the other side, the contagious diseases which continually visit most animal species destroy them in such numbers that the losses often cannot be repaired for many years, even with the most rapidly-multiply ing animals.  Thus, some sixty years ago, the sousliks suddenly disappeared in the neighbourhood of Sarepta, in South-Eastern Russia, in consequence of some epidemics; and for years no sousliks were seen in that neighbourhood.  It took many years before they became as numerous as they formerly were.(38)

Like facts, all tending to reduce the importance given to competition, could be produced in numbers.  Of course, it might be replied, in Darwin’s words, that nevertheless each organic being “at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction,” and that the fittest survive during such periods of hard struggle for life.  But if the evolution of the animal world were based exclusively, or even chiefly, upon the survival of the fittest during periods of calamities; if natural selection were limited in its action to periods of exceptional drought, or sudden changes of temperature, or inundations, retrogression would be the rule in the animal world.  Those who survive a famine, or a severe epidemic of cholera, or small-pox, or diphtheria, such as we see them in uncivilized countries, are neither the strongest, nor the healthiest, nor the most intelligent.  No progress could be based on those survivals—­the less so as all survivors usually come out of the ordeal with an impaired health, like the Transbaikalian horses just mentioned, or the Arctic crews, or the garrison of a fortress which has been compelled to live for a few months on half rations, and comes out of its experience with a broken health, and subsequently shows a quite abnormal mortality.  All that natural selection can do in times of calamities is to spare the individuals endowed with the greatest endurance for privations of all kinds.  So it does among the Siberian horses and cattle.  They are enduring; they can feed upon the Polar birch in case of need; they resist cold and hunger.  But no Siberian horse is capable of carrying half the weight which a European horse carries with ease; no Siberian cow gives half the amount of milk given by a Jersey cow, and no natives of uncivilized countries can bear a comparison with Europeans.  They may better endure hunger and cold, but their physical force is very far below that of a well-fed European, and their intellectual progress is despairingly slow.  “Evil cannot be productive of good,” as Tchernyshevsky wrote in a remarkable essay upon Darwinism.(39)