30 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 



those seeds succeed in growing each year. In 

 the first year, that poppy- will have produced ten 

 new poppy plants ; the year after, each of those 

 ten will have produced ten more, making the 

 total 100 ; in the third year, they will be 1,000 ; 

 in the fourth, 10,000 ; and so on in the same 

 progression till in a very few years the whole 

 world would simply be full of poppies. And 

 similarly with animals. If every egg in a cod's 

 roe developed into a mature fish, the sea would 

 soon be one solid and compact mass of cod-fish. 



Why doesn't this happen ? Because every 

 other kind is prodacing seeds or eggs at about 

 the same rate, and every one of them is fighting 

 against the other for its share of light and food 

 and soil and water. The stronger or better- 

 adapted survive, while the weaker or less- 

 adapted go to the wall, and are starved out of 

 existence. At first, to be sure, it sounds odd 

 to talk of a Struggle for Life among plants, which 

 seem too fixed and inert to battle against one 

 another. But they do battle for all that. Each 

 root is striving with all its might to fix itself 

 underground in the best position ; each leaf and 

 stem is struggling hard to overtop its neighbour, 

 and secure its fair share of carbon and of sun- 

 shine. When a garden is abandoned, you can 

 very soon see the result of this struggle ; for the 

 flowers, which we only keep alive by weeding — 

 that is to say, by uprooting the sturdier com- 

 petitors — are soon overgrown and killed out by 

 the weeds — that is to say, by the stronger and 

 better-adapted native plants of the district. 



This, then, is the nature and meaning of these 



V 



