54 A NEW ZEALAND NATURALIST'S CALENDAR. 



their kind, and this is more conspicuously manifested and 

 more easily observed among plants than among animals. 

 Those who study human statistics know that the death 

 rate among infants is high, and that the rate diminishes as 

 the adult stage is approached, a very considerable propor- 

 tion of children born into the world growing to maturity. 

 But on looking into the conditions of life among the lower 

 animals and plants it is found that it is not the few which 

 die and the many which survive, but that a very minute 

 proportion only of the progeny survives to maturity, 

 while an enormously vast majority die in the course of 

 their individual development. Figures are not available 

 for plants ; they may have been worked out by some of 

 those patient Teutonic observers who mine and fossick in 

 all sorts of dust heaps, only I cannot lay my hands on 

 them at present. Yet one has only to consider any fruiting 

 plant to notice what an enormous discrepancy there is 

 between the seeds produced and the resulting mature 

 plants. To anyone who has time for such an experiment 

 and it will be found a more instructive exercise than 

 worrying out the inane puzzles which are so commonly 

 propounded in magazines and other ephemeral literature 

 I recommend the following : Take a foxglove plant which 

 is nearly past flowering, and, picking a ripe capsule from 

 near the lower end of the raceme, count the contained 

 seeds. Then multiply this number by the number of 

 capsules borne by the plant, and the resulting figures will 

 be found to be very large. If all the foxglove seeds 

 ripening in and about Dunedin during this month of 

 February were to prodvice matiire plants, it is certain 

 there would be no room for any other kind of vegetation. 

 Yet the foxglove is not one of our commonest plants. 

 But there is no reason to believe that the number of these 

 plants which will be found a year hence will be much 

 larger than it is now. The inference, then, is that the 

 vast majority of the seeds now produced are doomed to 

 destruction. It was from a contemplation of facts like 

 this that Darwin was led to his views on the " struggle for 

 existence" and the "survival of the fittest." 



