LECTURE X

NATURAL SELECTION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY

DARWIN'S book on the "Origin of Species" did not make its way, even among men of science, without searching examination; and it is interesting to note that, in the early days of its history, all of its most prominent advocates were English in their intellectual training, although some, like Asa Gray, were not English by birth. Lyell, Wallace, Darwin, Gray, and Huxley knew Lamarck's writings well, and, in this day of Neo-Lamarckism, we may find profit in studying the influences that led all these vigorous and independent thinkers to condemn his speculations as worse than worthless, while they welcomed natural selection as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind.

The story of the reception of the "Origin," as it is told in Darwin's letters, shows how it won its way in spite of prejudice. Belief that the problem is one that man may hope to solve was rapidly growing among the thoughtful; for a long series of brilliant discoveries in embryology, in anatomy, in paleontology, in geographical biology, and in many other fields, had shown that zoology is orderly, and exhibits laws, like other sciences; but the remains of so many failures lay beside the path of history that most cautious students, in England at least, were in a hostile rather than a sympathetic frame of mind, and were indisposed to welcome a new attempt to bring all these classes of phenomena into a single. point of view.

To men like Huxley, who had refused to have anything to say to a necessary principle of universal progress, and had grown. weary of speculation, Darwin's book commended itself as strictly scientific; for it is based upon the hard work of half a lifetime, and, making no attempt to account for the fundamental properties

of living things, which it takes as it finds them, it demonstrates that the features in which the species of living things differ from one another, are due to influences that are still at work, and open to observation and experiment by scientific methods.

Darwin shows that individual animals and plants, even those of the same species, differ greatly among themselves; that these differences may be exhibited by any characteristic whatever — those upon which the species and genera of the systematist are based, as well as those which had been held to be varietal or individual; that, notwithstanding these differences, offspring tend to resemble their parents, and to be like them in the main; that man is able to bring about, and to fix or establish, changes of type, by breeding from selected parents; and that features exactly like those upon which species are based may be modified or produced by selection; and that what is thus accomplished by man may come about with equal certainty, even if more slowly, in nature through the struggle for existence and the extermination of the unsuccessful.

None of these propositions are very profound, or very difficult to grasp. They call for no unexampled powers of abstract thought, for they lie so near the surface that they have been formulated again and again.

Darwin says: "My brother, who is a very sagacious man, always said, 'You will find that some one has been before you'; and on the first page of the first edition of the "Origin," which was published in November, 1859, he says, after telling the reader that the subject has occupied him steadily for twenty years: "My work is now (1859) nearly finished; but as it will take me many more years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish this Abstract. I have the more especially been induced to do this, as Mr. Wallace, who is now studying the natural history of the Malay archipelago, has arrived at almost exactly the same general conclusions that I have on the origin of species. In 1858 he sent me a memoir on this subject, with a request that I would forward it to Sir Charles Lyell, who sent it to the Linnean Society, and it is published in the third volume of the Journal of that Society. Sir Charles

Lyell and Dr. Hooker, who both knew of my work,

the latter

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having read my sketch of 1844,-honored me by thinking it advisable to publish, with Mr. Wallace's excellent memoir, some brief extracts from my manuscript."

Soon after the publication of the "Origin," he writes to Lyell as follows: "Now for a curious thing about my book, and then I have done. In last Saturday's Gardener's Chronicle a Mr. Patrick Mathew publishes a long extract from his work on 'Naval Timber and Arboriculture,' published in 1831, in which he briefly but completely anticipates the theory of Natural Selection." A few days later, in the Gardener's Chronicle, he says: "I freely acknowledge that Mr. Mathew has anticipated by many years the explanation which I have offered of the origin of species, under the name of natural selection. I can do no more than offer an apology to Mr. Mathew for my entire ignorance of this publication. If another edition of my work is called for, I will insert to the foregoing effect."

A few years later Darwin writes to Hooker as follows: "Talking of the 'Origin,' a Yankee has called my attention to a paper attached to Dr. Wells's famous 'Essay on Dew,' which was read in 1813 to the Royal Society, but not then printed, in which he applies the principle of Natural Selection to the Races of Man. So poor old Patrick Mathew is not the first, and he cannot, or ought not, any longer to put on his title-page Discoverer of the Principle of Natural Selection.'"

In the "Historical Sketch" which is printed in all subsequent editions, Darwin fulfils his promise to Mathew, and also refers at length to Dr. W. C. Wells of Charleston, S.C., whose statement is contained in "An Account of a White Female, part of whose skin resembles that of a negro," afterwards (1818) published as part of an appendix to his "Two Essays on Dew and Single Vision."

After remarking that negroes and mulattoes enjoy an immunity from certain tropical diseases, he observes that all animals tend to vary to some degree, and that agriculturalists improve their domestic animals by selection, and that what is done in the latter case by art, seems to be done with equal efficacy, though more slowly, by nature, in the formation of varieties of mankind, fitted for the country which they inhabit. Of the accidental varieties of man,

which would occur among the first few and scattered inhabitants of the middle regions of Africa, some one would be better fitted than the others to bear the diseases of the country. This race would consequently multiply, while the others would decrease, not only from their inability to sustain the attacks of disease but from their incapacity to contend with their more vigorous neighbors. The color of this vigorous race would be black for the reason given. The same disposition to form varieties still existing, a darker and a darker race would in course of time occur; and as the darkest would be the best fitted for the climate, this would at length become the most prevalent if not the only race in the particular country in which it had originated.

It is sometimes said that the success of the "Origin," and the independent enunciation of its central conception by so many thinkers, proved that the subject was in the air, or that men's minds were prepared for it; but Darwin says he does not think this was strictly true; for while he occasionally sounded not a few naturalists, he never happened to come across a single one who seemed to doubt about the permanency of species. Even Lyell and Hooker, though they would listen with interest, never seemed to agree. He says that he tried once or twice to explain to able men what he meant by Natural Selection, but signally failed; and Huxley bears witness, as do others, that the sentiment of the most profound naturalists was critical rather than sympathetic.

Darwin tells us the publication in 1858 of Mr. Wallace's clever and admirably expressed essay, together with an abstract from his own notes, "excited very little attention, and the only published notice of them which I can remember was by Professor Houghton of Dublin, whose verdict was that all that was new in them was false, and that what was true was old."

Darwin has himself tried to analyze the mental qualities and conditions on which his success has depended; and he is no doubt right in attributing much of his success as an investigator and much of his influence upon scientific thought to the indefatigable industry which is so clearly shown in all his works; and the success of the "Origin" was no doubt due to its vast array of demonstrated facts, rather than to the way in which the argument was stated; but Lamarck was also an earnest, simple