HISTORICAL 35 



been published — one to Haeckel ^ and one to Wallace ^ — Darwin 

 also recorded in very similar words his debt to Malthus, and in the 

 Origin of Species, after describing what is meant by the struggle 

 for existence and how it comes about, says, ' it is the doctrine of 

 Malthus applied with manifold force to the animal and vegetable 

 kingdoms.' ^ So too Wallace, in his reply, after having been 

 presented with the first Darwin- Wallace medal by the Linnean 

 Society in 1908, acknowledged his debt to Malthus in the following 

 words : ' both Darwin and myself, at the critical period when our 

 minds were fully stored with a considerable body of preserved 

 information and reflection bearing upon the problem to be solved, 

 had our attention directed to the system of positive checks as 

 expounded by Malthus in his Principle of Population. It is an 

 unimportant detail that Darwin read this book two years after his 

 return from his voyage, while I read it before I went abroad and 

 it was a sudden recollection of its teachings that caused the 

 solution to flash upon me.' * 



Since the publication of the Origin of Species much attention has 

 been paid to the problem of quality as regards the human race. It 

 was obvious that if the human race had evolved from some lower 

 type, it was probably still in process of evolution, and that the 

 direction of evolution was by no means necessarily upwards. It 

 was also obvious that the further evolution of the race was to 

 some extent at least within human control, if and when men 

 chose to use the means of control that lay within their power. 

 Great impetus was given to this side of the problem by the work 

 of Sir Francis Galton, who coined the word ' eugenics '.^ Societies 

 for the study of eugenics and for the advocacy of eugenic ideals 

 have been started in England, in many European countries, in 

 America and elsewhere, and at the present day the educated 

 classes in every country are at least aware of the existence of the 

 problem of the quality, as they have long been aware of the 

 existence of the problem of the quantity, of population. 



The development of opinion on this subject has thus run a 

 peculiar course. Attention was drawn in early days to the 

 existence of the problem of numbers, but men were long satisfied 

 with asserting on comparatively simple grounds that a dense 



' Haeckel, History of Creation, vol. i, p. 134. - Marchant, A. R. Wallace, 



Letters and Reminiscences, vol. i, p. 13G. '■' Darwin, Origin of Species, p. 50. 



* Marchant, loc. cit., vol. i, p. IIG. ' See Sociological Papers, p. 45. Galton 



first proposed to use the word ' stirpiculture '. 



C2 



