ENVIRONMENT AND EVOLUTION KROPOTKIN. 411 



necessary materials for the evolution of new species. But he also 

 had seriously pondered upon the following question that was raised 

 by his first great work. Granting all that has been said about the 

 importance of the struggle for existence — would natural selection be 

 capable of increasing, or merely accentuating, from generation to 

 generation a new useful feature, if this feature appeared accident- 

 ally, in a fe.w individuals only, and was therefore submitted to the 

 law of all accidental changes? Is it not necessary, for obtaining 

 a gradual increase of the new character, that some external cause 

 should be acting in a definite direction for a number of generations 

 upon the majority of the individuals of a given group and its effects 

 be transmitted more or less from one generation to the next ? 



The reply that Darwin gave to this question in 18G8 in the revised 

 (sixth) edition of his Origin of Species was pretty definitely in the 

 affirmative. He wrote: 



It should not, however, be overlooked that certain rather strongly marked 

 variations, which no one would rank as mere individual variations, frequently 

 recur, owing to a similar organization being similarly acted on — of which fact 

 numerous instances could be given with our domestic productions. * * * 

 There can also be no doubt that the tendency to vary in the same manner has 

 often been so strong that all individuals of the same species have been similarly 

 modified ivithout the aid of any form of selection. 1 



Besides, everyone who will take the trouble (or rather, give him- 

 self the pleasure) of rereading Variation will see that such a thing 

 as an indefinite, haphazard variation, even with the aid of natural 

 selection, hardly had any importance for the great founder of the 

 theory of evolution at the time when he wrote this last work. 2 Over 

 and over again he repeated in it that variability depended entirely 

 upon the conditions of life; so that if the latter remained unaltered 

 for several generations, " there would be no variability, and conse- 

 quently no scope for the work of natural selection." And, on the 

 other hand, where the same variation continually recurs, owing to 

 " the action of some strongly predisposing cause," the appearance of 

 new varieties is rendered possible, independently of natural selec- 

 tion. In chapter xxiii he gave the facts he was able to collect before 

 1868, " rendering it probable that climate, food, etc., have acted so 

 definitely and powerfully on the organization of our domestic pro- 

 ductions that new subvarieties or races have been thus formed with- 

 out the selection by man or nature." It is also evident that if Darwin 

 had had at his disposal the data we have now he would not have 

 limited his conclusions to domesticated plants and animals. He 

 would have been able to extend them to variation in free nature. 



1 Origin of Species, 6th edition, p. 72 ; the italics are mine. 



2 See Variation in Domesticated Animals and Plants, vol. ii, pp. 289, 291, 300, 321, 322, 

 347. and so on, of the 1905 popular edition of Mr. Murray. 



