DARWIN. 73 



and with his special knowledge evolved from it the 

 brilliant idea of the preservation of better-equipped races 

 in the struggle for life, or, as Herbert Spencer put it, the 

 survival of the fittest. At one bound the gloomy revela- 

 tions of misery which the "Essay on Population" con- 

 tained, were exchanged for the bright view of perpetual 

 progress and improvement as being necessitated and 

 brought about by the very struggle which ensued upon 

 the natural increase of animal and plant life. Instead 

 of struggle and pain, producing starvation and extinction 

 merely, struggle and pain were seen as the conditions of 

 development and improvement ; the death of the lower, 

 the life of the higher. 



It is less profitable here to attempt to sketch the history 

 of ideas of evolution in general, because that history 

 as now revealed by research, and as detailed by many 

 writers, was not the path along which Darwin travelled. 

 Indeed, many of these ideas were not disinterred, and 

 certainly were not brought to Darwin's notice till after 

 the publication of the "Origin of Species." True he 

 read Robert Chambers's " Vestiges of Creation," which, 

 with its. "powerful and brilliant style," although displaying 

 in its earlier editions "little accurate knowledge and a 

 great want of scientific caution," Darwin acknowledges to 

 have done excellent service in calling attention to the 

 subject, in removing prejudice, and in preparing the 

 ground for the reception of analogous views. Herbert 

 Spencer, in his Essay on the Development Hypothesis, 

 first published in The Leader in March, 1852, and 

 republished in his "Essays" (first series, 1858), argued 

 that species have been modified, owing to change of cjr- 



