The Signature of All Things

Alma arrives in Holland in July 1854. She has been at sea for a year, although she initially had difficulty booking passage due to her insistence on bringing Roger the dog. Alma is writing a treatise on the idea that struck her while she was underwater, which she believes explains everything she questioned about why organisms change. As she puts it, “The natural world was a place of punishing brutality, where species large and small competed against each other in order to survive. In this struggle for existence, the strong endured; the weak were eliminated” (441). The eternal struggle for resources explains, to Alma, why species differentiate and mutate. William Herschel called it continuous creation; Alma calls it her theory of competitive alteration, and she uses her long study of mosses to explain the adaptations that different species have made, including her favorite, Dicranum. Alma writes and rewrites her treatise, claiming:

This life is a tentative and difficult experiment. Sometimes there will be victory after suffering—but nothing is promised. The most precious or beautiful individual may not be the most resilient. The battle of nature is not marked by evil, but by this one mighty and indifferent natural law: that there are simply too many life forms, and not enough resources for all to survive (447).