NATURAL SELECTION 155 



selection, and in such a manner that the means 

 used by horticulturists and cattle-breeders for the 

 improvement of their stock was what chiefly sug- 

 gested the celebrated law to the clever English 

 naturalist, as he himself intimates in his letter to 

 Haeckel. The knowledge of how a gardener, a 

 horticulturist, or a stock-rearer obtained in a short 

 time species that differed from one another through 

 newly acquired conditions much more than the 

 natural species, taught Darwin that in Nature 

 things would proceed on similar lines, although not 

 so exactly, since man obtained a greater difference 

 in an infinitely shorter space of time. Hence it is 

 inferred, too, that the operation of artificial selec- 

 tion is much superior to the natural one, the 

 struggle for life; that man disposes or accumulates 

 his resources so that he does, in a comparatively 

 short space of time, what Nature needs an un- 

 limited period to perform. In a word, the selec- 

 tion created by man is very superior to natural selec- 

 tion, and the struggle for existence is a great spring 

 in savage Nature, but always an unconscious means, 

 and one that disappears before the efficacy of selec- 

 tion manipulated by man with the same object. 

 Darwin studied the problem of natural selection so 

 completely, with such wealth of data, and succeeded 

 in showing that selection is a complement to adap- 

 tation and heredity, that his ideas triumphed, and 



