 & smiling fields" in which "a grain of sand turns the balance", a month later he wrote, of the "innumerable seeds" of a bulrush, "if a seed were produced with infinitesimal advantage it would have better chance of being propagated".He began to see a similarity between farmers selecting breeding livestock and what he came to call natural selection, still thinking of this as a benevolent law ordained to create adaptation.In his 1842 "sketch" expanding his theory, Darwin wrote that "De Candolle's war of nature,—seeing contented face of nature,—may be well at first doubted", but "considering the enormous geometrical power of increase in every organism" countries "must be fully stocked" referring to "Malthus on man"