332 SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



32. The ideas and reflections contained in this celebrated 



Malthus. 



essay, which has played a prominent part in the philo- 

 sophical literature of economics, could not have occurred 

 to any one who had studied human society or nature 

 merely in individual specimens or isolated cases ; for 

 they referred not so much to the natural history of a 

 single being, as to the peculiar relations and complica- 

 tions which arise in a community or society of beings, 

 some of these being applicable quite as much to animal 

 and plant life as to the life of men. In fact, it was a 

 chapter in the science of bionomics. Malthus, Darwin, 

 and Wallace were not " laboratory naturalists, to whom 

 the peculiarities and distinction of species, as such, their 

 distribution and their affinities, have little interest as 

 compared with the problems of histology and embryo- 

 logy, of physiology and morphology." l The problem of 

 population, whether it refers to man or other living 

 creatures, is one that will force itself upon those who 

 study nature and mankind on the large, on the outdoor, 

 scale, not as does the collector or dissector of specimens. 

 How has the face of the earth been peopled by plants, 

 animals, and human beings ? What are the forces which 



ones to be destroyed. The result 

 of this would be the formation of 

 new species. Here, then, I had 

 at last got a theory by which to 

 work," &c. Prof. Haeckel, in his 

 'History of Creation,' has dwelt 

 exhaustively on this connection of 

 Darwin with Malthus, quoting a 

 letter of Darwin's to him, dated 8th 

 October 1864, in which he says that 

 for years he could not comprehend 

 how any form should be so emi- 

 nently adapted to its special con- 

 ditions of life, but that when 

 through good fortune Malthus's 



book on Population came into his 

 hands, the idea of natural selection 

 came into his mind ('Schopfungs- 

 gesch.,' chap, vi.) In the first 

 paper which Darwin published in 

 the 'Journal of the Linneean 

 Society' ("Letter to Asa Gray, 1 ' 

 vol. iii. p. 51), he uses the term 

 "Natural Selection," and refers in 

 the abstract which he there gives 

 to Malthus ; whereas Wallace (ibid., 

 p. 56)introduces the term "Struggle 

 for Existence." 



1 Quoted from Wallace, ' Dar- 

 winism,' preface, p. vi. 



