EVOLUTION, HEREDITY, EUGENICS 515 



The three processes, overproduction, struggle for existence and 

 survival of the fittest, result in Natural Selection. Favorable adapta- 

 tions enable the fit to live while the others perish. Tied up with 

 these ideas was the one regarding sexual selection, in which Darwin 

 attempted to show that in the birds, for example, secondary 

 sexual characters such as brilliant plumage and beautiful songs 

 attracted the female, who selected or chose the male. This last 

 factor has been much debated, but we cannot gainsay the very 

 important point that the healthy and best adapted forms, able to 

 survive, will be able to reproduce. Certainly vigor exhibits itself 

 in brighter color and purposeful activity. 



Darwin wrote out a sketch of his theory in 1842, and in 1844 gave 

 his completed theoretical conclusions, showing the paper to his 

 friends Lyell and Hooker. But the public announcement of his 

 chief contribution was postponed until 1858, when he shared with 

 A. R. Wallace the credit for the idea of " evolution " from the 

 Natural Selection of those j'?/ to survive. 



A. R. Wallace (i 822-1913), another Englishman, was so en- 

 thusiastic after reading Darwin's Journal of the Beagle Voyage in 

 1845 ^hat he embarked in 1848 on an exploration of the Amazon 

 and Negro Rivers lasting 4 years. Later, after he had explored in 

 the Malay Archipelago, he prepared while at Sarawak (1855) a 

 paper in which he concluded that every species that had come into 

 existence in Nature was related to a species that preceded it. He, 

 like Charles Darwin, read Malthus, On Population, and in February, 

 1858, he sent Darwin a short paper entitled: "The tendency of 

 varieties to depart from the original type." 



Darwin at first thought most unselfishly to present Wallace's 

 paper to the Linnaean Society without comment. His friends, 

 including Dr. J. D. Hooker and Sir Charles Lyell, persuaded him 

 that after 20 years of careful observation had resulted in the for- 

 mulation of theories backed by many facts unmarshalled by Wallace, 

 the correct procedure was to present his own views in a paper to be 

 read at the same symposium. 



So far as the oft-quoted idea of the survival of the fit, later para- 

 phrased into Nietzsche's term the " super-man," is concerned, we 

 have no finer or more noble instance of the humanity of man to man 

 than that of Darwin and Wallace, the co-discoverers and crystal- 

 lizers of the principle of Evolution, vying with each other over the 



