124 CONDITIONS AFFECTING THE 



You will see from this that, at the end of the first year 

 the single plant will have produced fifty more of its 

 kind ; by the end of the second year these will have 

 increased to 2,500 ; and so on, in succeeding years, you 

 get beyond even trillions ; and I am not at all sure 

 that I could tell you what the proper arithmetical 

 denomination of the total number really is ; but, 

 at any rate, you will understand the meaning of all 

 those noughts. Then you see that, at the bottom, I 

 have taken the 51,000,000 of square miles, constituting 

 the surface of the dry land; and as the number of 

 square feet are placed under and subtracted from the 

 number of seeds that would be produced in the ninth 

 year, you can see at once that there would be an im- 

 mense number more of plants than there would be 

 square feet of ground for their accommodation. This is 

 certainly quite enough to prove my point ; that between 

 the eighth and ninth year after being planted the single 

 plant would have stocked the whole available surface of 

 the earth. 



This is a thing which is hardly conceivable — it seems 

 hardly imaginable — yet it is so. It is indeed simply the 

 law of Malthus exemplified. Mr. Malthus was a clergy- 

 man, who worked out this subject most minutely and 

 truthfully some years ago ; he showed quite clearly, — 

 and although he was much abused for his conclusions 

 at the time, they have never yet been disproved and 

 never will be — he showed that in consequence of the 

 increase in the number of organic beings in a geometrical 

 ratio, while the means of existence cannot be made to 

 increase in the same ratio, that there must come a time 

 when the number of organic beings will be in excess of 



