Darwin- Wallace Celebration. 117 



in order to escape death, spread themselves over all the 

 neighbouring countries, and the towns of Syria were 

 inundated with Egyptians. The streets and public places 

 were crowded by famished and dying skeletons. All the 

 most revolting modes of satisfying the cravings of hunger 

 were resorted to ; the most disgusting food was devoured 

 with eagerness ; and Volney mentions the having seen under 

 the walls of ancient Alexandria two miserable wretches 

 seated on the carcase of a camel, and disputing with the 

 dogs its putrid flesh. The depopulation of the two years 

 was estimated at one-sixth of all the inhabitants *. 



It was the perusal of such statements as these, extending 

 over every part of the world, and very varied in their 

 details, that produced such a deep and permanent impression 

 on my mind, though the individual facts were forgotten. 

 When, ten or twelve years later, while thinking (as I had 

 thought for years) over the possible causes of the change 

 of species, the action of these " positive checks " to increase, 

 as Malthus termed them, suddenly occurred to me. I then 

 saw that war, plunder and massacres among men were 

 represented by the attacks of carnivora on herbivora, and 

 of the stronger upon the weaker among animals. Famine, 

 droughts, floods and winter's storms, would have an even 

 greater effect on animals than on men ; while as the former 

 possessed powers of increase from twice to a thousand-fold 

 greater than the latter, the ever-present annual destruction 

 must also be many times greater. 



Then there flashed upon me, as it had done twenty years 

 before upon Darwin, the certainty, that those which, year by 

 year, survived this terrible destruction must be, on the 

 whole, those which had some little superiority enabling 

 them to escape each special form of death to which the 

 great majority succumbed that, in the well-known formula, 

 the fittest would survive. Then I at once saw, that the 

 ever present variability of all living things would furnish 

 the material from which, by the mere weeding out of those 



* Voy. de Volney, torn. i. c. xii. s. ii. 



