THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 161 
watchword of the day. Yet this designation is, perhaps, in 
many respects not very happily chosen, and the phenomena 
might probably have been more accurately described as 
“ Competition for the Means of Subsistence.” For under the 
name of “Struggle for Life,’ many relations are compre- 
hended which properly and strictly speaking do not belong 
to it. As we have seen from the letter inserted in the 
last chapter, Darwin arrived at the idea of the “Struggle 
for Existence” from the study of Malthus’ book “On the 
Conditions and the Consequences of the Increase of Popula- 
tion.” It was proved in that important work, that the 
number of human beings, on the average, increases in a 
geometrical progression, while the amount of articles of food 
increase only in an arithmetical progression. This dispro- 
portion gives rise to a number of inconveniences in the 
human community, which cause among men a continual 
competition to obtain the necessary means of life, which 
do not suffice for all. 
Darwin’s theory of the struggle for life is, to a certain 
extent, a general application of Malthus’ theory of popula- 
tion to the whole of organic nature. It starts from the 
consideration that the number of possible organic indi- 
viduals which might arise from the germs produced, is far 
greater than the number of actual individuals which, in 
fact, do simultaneously live on the earth’s surface. The 
number of possible or potential individuals is given us by 
the number of the eggs and organic germs produced by 
organisms. The number of these germs, from each of which, 
under favourable circumstances, an individual might arise, 
is very much larger than the number of real or actual 
individuals—that is, of those that really arise from these 
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