41 



seeds ; in one capsule off a poppy plant 40,000 seeds have been 

 counted. 



Pick up the next puff" ball you find in the fields, and as you press 

 out the brown dust into the air try to imagine how many millions 

 of grains there are ; each one could produce a new p iff ball. Or 

 note again the spores on the back of one pinna on the frond of a 

 fern ; muitiply that untold number by the number of pinnae, and 

 that again by the fronds on one root. 



And so in the animal world. Look at the mass of frog 

 spawn in our ponds in April ; see the countless thousands of 

 tadpoles from it that blacken the bottom of the ponds in May. The 

 herring lays fi-om 30,000 to 70,000 eggs ; the lobster 30,000 ; the 

 oyster 1,000,000 ; the sturgeon 7,000,000 ; the cod 10,000,000. 

 Darwin tells us that the progeny of a pair of elephants might 

 amomit in 750 years to 19,000,000. Only it doesn't. 



Now if we took our standpoint on th- se facts ; we might well look 

 forward and ask how will all this end ? The Darwinites, like the 

 Malthusians, do take their stand here, and say that in consequence 

 of the enormous progeny of animals and plants, " by far the 

 greatest number must always perish from generation to generation 

 for want of space, of food, of air, of raw material. " The struggle 

 for existence," says Darwin, " inevitably follows from the high 

 geometrical ratio of their increase." And again, "this geometrical 

 tendency to increase must be checked by destruction at some period 

 of life." 



Miss Buckley, in a short account of Darwin states, " All living 

 beings multiply so rapidly that there would be neither room nor 

 food enough upon the earth for them if they were all to live ; 

 therefore immense numbers must die young." 



Malthus reasoned as if it were an actual fact that population 

 doubled itself every quarter of a century and argued from it that 

 we must apply chec us to the increase, as if natural laws were 

 ineffectual ; and that if we did not adopt some checks then nature 

 in her rough and pitiless fashion would apply them in the forms of 

 starvation and disease. But it is evident that if he was -mistaken 

 in the disproportionate increase of man and his food (and the very 

 application of his theory by Darwin proves that he was), then all 

 the argument he built upon it falls to the gro md. But now in the 

 struggle for existence it is not argued that any checks applied by 

 man are necessary ; we are told that nature herself provides them 

 in the form of starvation, disease, or the existence of destructive 

 agencies, such as carnivorous animals, parasites, &c. S e now 

 what this involves. We are required to believe that the Creator 

 first endows every living thing, whether plant or animal, with the 

 power of multiplying by a high geometrical ratio ; and that having 



