noun phrase popularized from 1894 by Kipling's "Jungle Book." In general use, a code of survival for a pitiless place. See jungle (n.). In the book, among the clauses mentioned are "strike first and then give tongue," "life and food depend on keeping your temper." But it also governs daily life and is of "immense complexity," with different codes for different species. It "never orders anything without a reason."

A poem published in the second Jungle Book (1895) reads in part:

Now these are the laws of the jungle, and many and mighty are they;

But the head and the hoof of the law and the haunch and the hump is—Obey!

The verse also includes the noted line, "For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack."

Before Kipling, it had been used in 1892 in a U.S. Christian response to social Darwinism:

The fierce competition we see in the commercial world to-day is the attempt to re-enact, in business life, the principle of natural selection, or "the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence." This is the law of the jungle, but not of the social realm. ["The Making of a Man," Rev. J.W. Lee, 1892]

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jungle(n.)

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