8i8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



hero credit for wliat he really was and what he really did; it 

 does not consist in attributing to him the work actually done by 

 others, while suppressing the very facts which form his chief 

 claim to the gratitude and consideration of posterity. Now there 

 is one invaluable piece of work which Darwin really did do, and 

 do effectively he discovered and proved to the hilt the theory of 

 natural selection, as a cause, and probably the chief cause, both of 

 the diversity of species and of their adaptation to the environ- 

 ment. And there are two important pieces of work which Dar- 

 win did not do, but with which he is generally credited he did 

 not originate the idea of descent with modilScation in plants and 

 animals ; and he did not originate the general idea of evolution, 

 as a cosmical process. These last two ideas come to us from else- 

 where. That of descent with modification we derive from Eras- 

 mus Darwin, Lamarck, and others, following in the footsteps of 

 still earlier vague guessers. That of evolution as a pervading 

 cosmical process we derive from Herbert Spencer, and I venture 

 to say from Herbert Spencer alone. Even the word is Mr. 

 Spencer's ; before his time, it was never used, I believe, in that 

 particular sense ; and after him, it was seldom employed by Dar- 

 win, who used it (when he used it at all) in reference to Mr. 

 Spencer's general concepts. So, too, the phrases, " survival of the 

 fittest/' " adaptation to the environment," and others, due entirely 

 to Mr. Spencer, are regarded as a rule by the averagely well-read 

 man as purely " Darwinian." It seems to me, therefore, that to 

 do justice to Mr. Spencer in this matter is also incidentally to do 

 justice to Darwin. For in this place, Darwin, with his inflexible 

 sense of equity, his perfect generosity, his admirable self-eff'ace- 

 ment, would have been the last man to put forward a claim to 

 what belonged of right to others ; and in the second place, with 

 his cautious, experimental English mind, he would never have 

 desired to have his name associated with many of Mr. Spencer's 

 most brilliant and powerful a priori achievements. 



Nevertheless, before the appearance of Mr. Clodd's book, there 

 were, I believe, but two works extant which endeavored to put 

 this question in its true light, and even there mainly as regarded 

 the theory of natural selection. One of those two books was Mr. 

 Samuel Butler's Evolution Old and New ; the other, if I may ven- 

 ture to mention it, was my own small volume on Charles Darwin. 

 But Mr. Butler, both in the work I have just named, and still 

 more in Luck or Cunning, while doing full justice to the pre- 

 cursors and contemporaries of Darwin, has suffered himself to be 

 .carried away by a most singular preconception as to Charles Dar- 

 win himself, and has represented that most modest and self-effac- 

 ing of savants as deliberately endeavoring to filch for himself 

 the discoveries and achievements of biologists who went before 



