So it is with plants; cases could be given of introduced plants which have become common throughout whole islands in a period of less than ten years.

Several of the plants, such as the cardoon and a tall thistle, which are now the commonest over the wide plains of La Plata, clothing square leagues of surface almost to the exclusion of every other plant, have been introduced from Europe; and there are plants which now range in India, as I hear from Dr.Falconer, from Cape Comorin to the Himalaya, which have been imported from America since its discovery.

In such cases, and endless others could be given, no one supposes that the fertility of the animals or plants has been suddenly and temporarily increased in any sensible degree.

The obvious explanation is that the conditions of life have been highly favourable, and that there has consequently been less destruction of the old and young and that nearly all the young have been enabled to breed.

Their geometrical ratio of increase, the result of which never fails to be surprising, simply explains their extraordinarily rapid increase and wide diffusion in their new homes.
In a state of nature almost every full-grown plant annually produces seed, and among animals there are very few which do not annually pair.
Hence we may confidently assert that all plants and animals are tending to increase at a geometrical ratio--that all would rapidly stock every station in which they could any how exist, and that this geometrical tendency to increase must be checked by destruction at some period of life.