ee aay — 3. 
41 
seeds ; in one capsule off a poppy plant 40,000 seeds have been 
counted. 
Pick up the next puff ball you find in the fields, and as you press 
out the brown dust into the air try to imagine how many millions 
of grains there are ; each one could produce a new piff ball. Or 
note again the spores on the back of one pinna on the frond of a 
fern ; muitiply that untold number by the number of pinnae, and 
that again by the fronds on one root. 
And so in the animal world. Look at the mass of frog 
spawn in our ponds in April; see the countless thousands of 
tadpoles from it that blacken the bottom of the pondsin May. The 
herring lays from 30,000 to 70,000 eggs; the lobster 30,000; the 
oyster 1,000,000 ; the sturgeon 7,000,000; the cod 10,000,000. 
Darwin tells us that the progeny of a pair of elephants might 
amount in 750 years to 19,000,000. Only it doesn’t. 
Now if we took our standpoint on thse facts; we might well look 
forward and ask how will all this end? The Darwinites, like the 
Malthusians, do take their stand here, and say that in consequence 
of the enormous progeny of animals and plants, ‘‘by far the 
greatest number must always perish from generation to generation 
for want of space, of food, of air, of raw material. ‘« The struggle 
for existence,’ says Darwin, ‘‘ inevitably follows from the high 
geometrical ratio of their increase.” And again, ‘‘this geometrical 
tendency to increase must be checkéd by destruction at some period 
of life.” 
Miss Buckley, in a short account of Darwin states, ‘“ All living 
beings multiply so rapidly that there would be neither room nor 
food enough upon the earth for them if they were all to live; 
therefore immense numbers must die young.” 
Malthus reasoned as if it were an actual fact that population 
doubled itself every quarter of a century. and argued from it that 
we must apply checks to the increase, as if natural laws were 
ineffectual ; and that if we did not adopt some checks then nature 
in her rough and pitiless fashion would apply them in the forms of 
starvation and disease. But itis evident that if he was -mistaken 
in the disproportionate increase of man and his food (and the very 
application of his theory by Darwin proves that he was), then all 
the argument he built upon it falls to the ground. But now in the 
struggle for existence it is not argued that any checks applied by 
“man are necessary; we are told that nature herself provides them 
_in the form of starvation, disease, or the existence of destructive 
agencies, such as carnivorous animals, parasites, &c. S.e now 
what this involves. We are required to believe that the Creator 
first endows every living thing, whether plant or animal, with the 
power of multiplying by a high geometrical ratio; and that having 
