lOO Thomas Henry Iluxlcy 



kingdoms. As soon as this reason was provided them, 

 they turned to the store of facts within their own 

 knowledge, and rapidly arranged the evidence which 

 had been lurking only partly visible in favour of the 

 fact of evolution. It cannot be disputed that here and 

 there earlier writers than Darwin and Wallace had sug- 

 gested the possibility of natural selection acting upon 

 existing variations so as to cause survival of the fittest. 

 MacGillivray, the Scots naturalist, and the father of 

 Huxley's companion on the Rattlesnake, had published 

 suggestions which came exceedingly near to Darwin's 

 theory. In 1831 Mr. Patrick Matthew had published 

 a work on Naval Architecture and Timber, and in it had 

 stated the essential principle of the Darwinian doctrine 

 of struggle and survival. Still earlier, in 18 13, a Dr. 

 W. C. Wells, in a paper to the Royal Society on " A 

 White Female, Part of whose Skin Resembles that of a 

 Negro," had, as Darwin himself freely admitted, dis- 

 tinctly recognised the principle of natural selection — 

 but applied it only to the races of man, and to certain 

 characters alone. Finally, long before either of these, 

 Aristotle himself had written, in Physics, ii., 8 : " Why 

 are not the things which seem the result of design, 

 merely spontaneous variations, which, being useful, 

 have been preserved, while others are continually 

 eliminated as unsuitable ? ' ' None of these foreshadow- 

 ings were supported by lengthy evidence, nor worked 

 out into an elaborate theory; and it was not until Dar- 

 win had done this that we can say the birth of natural 

 selection really took place. Huxley writes : 



" The suggestion that new species may result from the select- 

 ive action of external conditions upon the variations from their 

 specific type which individuals present,— and which we call 

 'spontaneous,' because we are ignorant of their causation,— is 



