v Dawvin on the waste of seeds. 59 



passage quoted. It is not a platitude ; on the con- 

 trary, it is an acute and sagacious set of observations, 

 by no means obvious, and yet perfectly true except 

 in the concluding sentence, which treats of a subject 

 namely, the apparent waste of seeds whereof the 

 true bearing was not, and could not be, understood 

 at any time before the publication of Darwin's great 

 work on the Origin of Species. 



The full title of that work is The Origin of Species 

 by means of Natural Selection, or the preservation of 

 Favoured Eaces in the Struggle for Life. As the word 

 Darwinism, in common language, is often used as a 

 mere synonym for the entire doctrine of organic 

 Evolution, and as the fundamental conceptions of 

 Darwin's theory, though certainly true, are by no 

 means obvious, I shall give an account, in outline, 

 first of the general doctrine of Evolution, and then of 

 Darwin's attempt to explain organic Evolution by 

 means of Natural Selection. 



The theory of Evolution, stated in the most 

 general terms, is merely this, that everything has 

 become what it is by a gradual process under natural 

 law. In the organic world, Evolution means that not 

 only every individual organism has been evolved out 

 of a simple germ by a process of ever-increasing com- 

 plication, but that species and classes have been pro- 

 duced by descent, with modification, from other and 

 simpler species and classes ; so that it is possible, and 

 perhaps probable, though for want of evidence not 

 demonstrable, that all the individuals of every species 



