90 WHAT IS LIFE ? 



and the conditions are suitable, it immediately begins 

 to grow, from its own inherent powers?- just as a seed 

 does in the soil and governed by the same laws. If it 

 is not fertilized, it is cast forth to die : Nature murders 

 her offspring. 2 



1 " From the time that the ovum quits the ovary, it ceases to be a 

 part of the parent, and is dependent on her only for a due supply of 

 nourishment, which it converts by its own inherent powers into its 

 proper fabric." (Carpenter's " Principles of Human Physiology," 

 9th edition, 1881, p. 895.) 



3 When we consider the probable prime cause of all wars. viz. 

 over-population ; when we consider that all diseases are created by 

 powers mostly beyond our control ; when we consider that famine is 

 produced by natural laws also, which, in our present ignorant 

 condition, we cannot control when we consider that all these, 

 apparently to us, dreadful calamities, are forced upon us by 

 Nature, that they fundamentally are the acts of Nature, then 

 we get some idea of the stupendous and apparently indiscriminate 

 manner in which Nature murders her offspring. There is no 

 morality, no religion, no mercy in Nature. Sir John Herschel wrote,* 

 " For the benefit of those who discuss the subjects of Population, 

 War, Pestilence, Famine, &c., it may be as well to mention that the 

 number of human beings living at the end of the hundredth genera- 

 tion, commencing from a single pair, doubling at each generation 

 (say for thirty years), and allowing for each man, woman, .and child 

 an average space of four feet in height, and one foot square, would 

 form a vertical column, having for its base the whole surface of the 

 earth and sea spread out into a plane, and for its height 3,674 times 

 the sun's distance from the earth ! " 



The mean distance of the sun from the earth is over ninety-two 

 millions of miles. Eemark, this accounts for the would be living popu- 

 lation, it does not account for the, so called, dead matter of which 

 the dead human being was composed, and this also takes no account of 

 the innumerable number of human beings in their initial stages, which 

 as we have seen are being constantly destroyed, nor of other organisms 

 which develop and grow and die, the same as the human being. 



* Fortnightly Review, No. 1, May loth, 1865, p. 83. 



