1462 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



is a rational conception. And conversely, that unfavourable varia- 

 tions are thereby disadvantaged, and so tend to disappear before 

 their betters. Hence, after all, the wonder — as with so many other 

 advances (before and after Columbus' egg\) — is that Darwin and 

 Wallace had not yet more anticipators in this idea, of survival of the 

 fitter and establishment of their types accordingly, than their two 

 or three predecessors (as notably Patrick Matthew, for timber; or 

 for human races, Dr. Wells), whom Darwin loyally acknowledged, 

 but who failed to realise the wider application of their hypothesis, 

 and to work it out further into general biological theory. In such 

 ways then, do we not see how this theory was as thoroughly con- 

 gruent with the development of our age of mechanical advance, as 

 was Paley's watch theory — for theologians, at least— with its 

 beginnings? In fact, even in these beginnings, its very foremost 

 figure, James Watt, had gone beyond Paley; for when asked, 

 "Why do you not advertise your new steam-engines?" he replied: 

 "It's not necessary, our works are as busy as they can be; and 

 besides, there soon won't be any of the older kinds of steam-engine 

 left in the world!" There is a clear anticipation of natural selection, 

 though not applied to organisms. It also helps to illustrate how, 

 since in Darwin's generation the British public was then easily 

 leading the world in mechanical invention and progress, it had a 

 good many minds ready for this kindred biological doctrine. But it 

 may be said — the doctrine found wide acceptance in Germany, not 

 yet so industrialised. True, but aided by a different progress, that 

 of the impressive extension of Prussian victories in the decade after 

 The Origin of Species, with conquests accordingly, as of Schleswig- 

 Holstein in 1864, over Austria, and of much of South and West 

 Germany in 1866, and of Alsace-Lorraine in 1870-71, with full 

 development of Empire accordingly; so that in these expansions 

 (as indeed, though less dramatically, with British imperial exten- 

 sions), there were social examples of the associated biologic concep- 

 tion, that the forms of life successful in surviving their struggle 

 for existence naturaUy extend their area of geographical distribution 

 as well. In France, however, the Darwinian doctrine of evolution 

 through natural selection made much slower progress; so with her 

 relative inferiority in manufactures to Britain, and in war to Ger- 

 many, it seemed to these countries fresh evidence of her backward- 

 ness, that even such evolutionists as there were should still remain 

 more in line with Buff on or with Lamarck ; and thereafter — though 

 not, of course, without some complete acceptances of Darwin — be 

 more inclined to neo-Lamarckian doctrines than to Weismann's or 

 other neo-Darwinian teaching, and thus be more ready for Bergson's 

 Evolutiojt Creatrice, with its substantial revival of Lamarck's essen- 

 tial doctrine. His conception — ^too readily misunderstood by German 

 and English-speaking biologists as mere "inheritance of acquired 



