. 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 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 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 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 number 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 result of the arrival of a time
coming for every species when exactly as many members must be destroyed
as are born; that is the inevitable ultimate result of the rate of
production. Now, what is the result of all this? I have said that there
are forty-nine struggling against every one; and it amounts to this,
that the smallest possible start given to any one seed may give it an
advantage which will enable it to get ahead of all the others; anything
that will enable any one of these seeds to germinate six