120 CONDITIONS AFFECTING THE 



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

 the law of Malthus exemplified. Mr. Malthus was a 

 clergyman, 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 geometri- 

 cal 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 the power of production of nutriment, and that 

 thus some check must arise to the further increase of 

 those organic beings. At the end of the ninth year we 

 have seen that each plant would not be able to get its 

 full square foot of ground, and at the end of another 

 year it would have to share that space with fifty others 

 the produce of the seeds which it would give off. 



What, then, takes place ? Every plant grows up, 

 flourishes, occupies its square foot of ground, and gives 

 off its fifty seeds ; but notice this, that out of this num- 

 ber only one can come to anything ; there is thus, as it 

 were, forty-nine chances to one against its growing up ; 

 it depends upon the most fortuitous circumstances 

 whether any one of these fifty seeds shall grow up and 

 flourish, or whether it shall die and perish. This is 

 what Mr. Darwin has drawn attention to, and called the 

 " Struggle for Existence ; " and I have taken this 

 simple case of a plant because some people imagine that 

 the phrase seems to imply a sort of fight. 



I have taken this plant and shown you that this is 

 the result of the ratio of the increase, the necessary re- 

 sult of the arrival of a time coming for every species 



