Principles of western civilisation

34 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

is no plant so unproductive as this—and their seedlings next year produced two, and so on, then in twenty years there would be a million plants.’ “Even slow-breeding man,” says Darwin, ‘‘has doubled in twenty-five years, and, at this rate, in less than a thousand years there would literally not be standingroom for his progeny.”* Of every form of life in the world the same law holds good: its rate of increase tends to overbalance the conditions of its life.®

This is the first fundamental principle with which we are concerned in the Darwinian hypothesis. The second principle which we have to take into account is, that we find in the individuals so produced a tendency to variation in all directions within small degrees, with the capacity for the transmission to offspring of the result. This individual variability, as Mr. Wallace has taken considerable pains to show in a lengthy examination of the evidence,* ‘is a general character of all common and widespread species of animals or plants”; and, further, “‘it extends, so far as we know, to every part and organ, whether external or internal, as well as to every mental faculty”; and, still further, ‘‘each part or organ varies to a considerable extent independently of other parts.” °

From these two great classes of facts, now

1 Exactly, 1,048,576. 2 Origin of Spectes, chap. tii.

8 The elephant is reckoned the slowest breeder of all known animals. Assuming that it begins breeding when thirty years old, and goes on till ninety years of age, bringing forth only six young in the interval, and surviving till one hundred years old, Darwin reckoned that in a period of some 750 years there would be living, as the descendants of a single pair, nearly nineteen million elephants (Origin of Species, c. iil. p. 51).

4 Darwinism, c. iii, and iv.

5 [bid. p. 81.