APPENDICES 1461 



to his public, as far as possible from field-naturalists, that each 

 of these naturalists was independently stirred to supply the ele- 

 ment of interpretation Malthus had missed. For where he saw only 

 the survival of the survivors, from elimination he thought of as 

 indiscriminate (unless providential), they saw that even in poverty, 

 hunger, and disease, and other checks to population, there was 

 still large scope for the escape of those best adapted to their environ- 

 ment; in short, the survival of the fitter and the fittest — "natural 

 selection" accordingly. We are thus ready to understand that 

 eminent American historian of economic theories, when he describes 

 Darwin as "the last of the great British economists". 



Again, in further conversations with Wallace, and in the rich and 

 beautiful garden he had made, he would pull a flower among those 

 he loved and lucidly descant upon each of its details of form, as of 

 adaptive origin, even to expressing his convinced faith that the 

 curious and characteristic wrinklings of the corolla of the Snap- 

 dragon (Antirrhinum) had had the like origin and survival value, 

 even if he could not yet demonstrate this. Here then, full and clear, 

 was his general view of the flower, or other organism, as an 

 amazingly complex resultant and co-adjustment of gradually 

 accumulated advantageous and thus successful variations. He did 

 not indeed use the analogy of the complex machine, built up to its 

 modern elaboration, as resulting from the successive incorporation 

 of innumerable minor patents into the simple original one; nor at 

 that time did one think of this analogy either. Yet our later reflec- 

 tion still remains clear of him, of Darwin, and of ourselves as so far 

 Darwinians alike — that here in the industrial age, with its many 

 inventions, was at least a subconscious source of such suggestion. 

 Recall that Darwin expressed indebtedness to having had to read, 

 for Cambridge University entrance, Paley's Evidences of Christianity, 

 with its famous illustration of the watch found on the heath by some 

 one ignorant of such a strange machine, yet thence reasoning to its 

 design by its watchmaker. It is, of course, of the very nature of 

 science, even before any concept of evolution, to replace such 

 theological anthropomorphism in terms of orderly causation. Our 

 modern knowledge of watches and other complex mechanisms is of 

 all having progressed, by incorporation of successive inventions, 

 with fuller and finer adaptations to use ; so with consequent survival 

 of each improved type of watch over its predecessors, yet its super- 

 sedure in turn by further improved successors. We are thus already 

 thinking in terms of the general process of evolution. Thence to 

 project this conception of such progress— so akin to cumulative 

 patenting — upon the variations more or less observable in every 

 kind of organism, and to see that those favourable to better internal 

 working, or to external adaptation, should be of advantage to its 

 more efficient functioning, and thus to its survival and continuance, 



