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consciously sets himself to write serious history after
the fashion of the ditty of Guy Fawkes :—
“ I’ll sing you a doleful tragedy, Guy Fawkes the prince of
sinisters,
Who once blew up the House of Lords, the King, and all
his ministers ;
That is, he would have blown ’em up, and they’d have all
been cindered,
Or seriously scorched at least—if he had not been
hindered.”
It is obvious, then, that the output of life has been
unduly appreciated and overvalued. This treatment is
derived from Malthus, who, in his Essay on Population,
laid down the proposition that the human race tended
to increase in a geometrical ratio, while the vegetable
world only increased in an arithmetical ratio. In adopt
ing this doctrine as the basis of the theory of Natural
Selection, Mr. Darwin and his followers seem to have
enlarged the teaching of Malthus by extending the
increase in a geometrical ratio to the vegetable world ;
while at the same time they seem to have lost sight of the
fact, that the greater portion of the essay of Malthus
is taken up with discussing the checks to this enormous
increase of population in the case of man.
The tendency to increase in a geometrical ratio is
always a potential attribute of every species: but the
realisation of that tendency depends upon the conditions
in which it is placed. In some cases there is an enor
mous increase, if not literally an increase in a geometrical
ratio ; in some cases there is a fixed population from year
to year ; in some cases a species maintains its existence
with the greatest difficulty, so that its numbers decrease
in each generation. We have now to consider what is
the relation between this actual output of life and that