Stupidity Street 171 



locked. Nobody on the Street has sought to find 

 a key where it is to be found, in the origin of life 

 itself. All life has a common origin, an invisible 

 cell protoplasm. Countless billions of different 

 creatures live on the earth, in the water, and in 

 the air, they are all struggling for existence, and 

 each uses the more or less feeble spark of intelli- 

 gence implanted within it. Now there is not a 

 creature on the face of the earth, the huge ele- 

 phant and the tiny aphis that destroys a rose leaf, 

 that left to breed unchecked would not crowd 

 everything else off the planet. The people on the 

 Street know nothing of Nature's marvelous fer- 

 tility and power of reproduction. The human 

 mind staggers in attempting to grasp this appal- 

 ling thing. Linnaeus, the great naturalist, study- 

 ing the so-called "plant lice" found that in one 

 year a single aphis would produce a quintillion of 

 descendants. How do you write a quintillion 

 using the English method of enumeration? Write 

 the figure one and after it thirty zeroes. The sec- 

 ond year, from one single aphis you would have a 

 number of descendants that to represent, you 

 would have to write the figure one and sixty 

 zeroes, Thus from a creature so small that you 

 can scarcely see it, if all its young were allowed to 

 live and breed, in a very short time, there would 

 pile up a loathsome mass of aphids greater in 

 bulk than the world itself. Malthus was right; 



