PRACTICAL LAWS OF LIFE 



331 



learn the laws under which we live may amount to criminal 

 carelessness. We discover and learn laws in order that we 

 may be able to obey them, that is, bring our lives into har- 

 mony with them. Charles Darwin, by lifelong application 

 and sacrifice, marked the greatest advance in discovery of 

 the laws of life that the world has known. These are not 

 far-away abstractions of thought, and nothing can be of more 

 intense practical value than a knowledge of them. Work 

 done or life lived in accordance with them is always effective 

 and successful, while that done or 

 lived in opposition to them is 

 always futile. 



While it may be sufficient that 

 a few specialists learn, how to 

 control the chemical and physical 

 forces of nature in accordance with 

 the laws of physics and chemistry, 

 the forces of living nature are so 

 numerous, affect the lives of all 

 alike so intimately, and are so 

 powerful that common welfare re- 

 quires of every member of a civi- 

 lized community that he know enough about them to do 

 his part. 



Law of geometrical increase. All living things tend to in- 

 crease in geometrical ratio. This is the problem of the farmer 

 who promised to pay the blacksmith one kernel of wheat for 

 the first 'nail in his horse's hoofs, two for the second, four for 

 the third, and so on. The sixty-fourth nail alone would cost 

 him 6,141,451,656,032 bushels of wheat more than the en- 

 tire wheat crop of the world for 2000 years. The farmer did 

 not know the law of geometrical increase when he promised 

 to pay the wheat. Millions of " farmers " who do not know 

 this law are promising to pay, in control of insects or fungi 



FIG. 163. Diagram showing five 

 generations doubling by geo- 

 metrical progression 



