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But this is not all: we are invited to bear in mind
the fact of the enormous increase in a geometrical ratio,
which is both actual and potential, in order that we
may understand “the ever-recurring destruction of the
enormous annual increase” which accompanies a fixed
population.
Mr. Fiske adopts the same method of treating the
subject in the following passage :—
“ Let us take the case of a plant which yields one hundred seeds
yearly, and suppose each of these seeds to reach maturity so as
to yield its hundred offspring in the following year : in the tenth
year the product would be one hundred thousand trillions. . . .
We may now begin dimly to realise how prodigious is the slaughter
which unceasingly goes on throughout the organic world. For ob
viously when a plant, like the one just cited, maintains year by year
a tolerable uniformity in its numbers, it does so only because on
the average ninety-nine seeds perish prematurely for one that sur
vives long enough to produce other seeds.”—(Outlines of Cosmic
Philosophy, vol. ii.,p. n.)
Here we have an output of life amounting to one hun
dred thousand trillions suggested ; and at the same time
it is admitted that the actual output only amounts to
one thousand—that is, one hundred per annum for ten
years.
The principle of a tendency to increase in a geometrical
ratio cannot have the power which resides in heat when
it is latent. In that case, whether latent or not, heat
represents so much force in a particular condition. But
a tendency which remains a tendency occupies a different
category. We must not venture to build on the calcula
tions of a potential increase which cannot possibly become
actual, any more than we ought to treat as actual history
the story of a world that might have been. There is
about as much common sense in such rhetorical science
as there is in such imaginative history. And nobody
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