THE RIGHT TO LIVE 197 



of offensiveness — ''as mean as pusley," the 

 saying goes. A single plant of this species 

 bore over two million seeds, surely a marvel- 

 ous prodigalit3^ And yet even these great 

 numbers are certainly not the full measure of 

 the plant's capacity, for some seeds may have 

 dropped off before the time of counting, and 

 many more might still have ripened if the in- 

 terests of science, or other untoward circum- 

 stances, had not cut short a flourishing career. 

 But weeds are not the only plants to show 

 a superfluity of seeds. How many seeds do Prolificacy of 

 you think, are borne on a single beech tree, other plants 

 or even an oak? Certainly many hundreds 

 more than ever grow into trees. And the 

 grasses, and climbers, and shrubs, and the 

 numerous wayside plants that individually 

 affect our lives so little that we do not know 

 them by name, does it not seem safe to 

 assume that they are potentially capable, to 

 be conservative, of a fifty-fold annual increase, 

 rising in not a few instances to many thous- 

 and-fold, and sometimes to a million-fold? 

 But the productive spots are already occu- 

 pied, and outside of cultivated lands largely 

 with perennial plants, so that there is little 

 chance of even one out of the large number of 

 offspring finding conditions for average devel- 

 opment. What becomes of the other 49, or 

 999, or 999,999 ? Many never find the op- 



