1 6 CHARLES DARWIN 



Darwin's early boyhood. The bearings of the nebular 

 hypothesis upon the rise of Darwinian evolutionism are 

 by no means remote : the entire modern scientific 

 movement forms, in fact, a single great organic whole, 

 of which the special doctrine of biological development 

 is but a small separate integral part. All the theories 

 and doctrines which go to make it up display the one 

 common trait that they reject the idea of direct creative 

 interposition from without, and attribute the entire 

 existing order of nature to the regular unfolding of one 

 undeviating continuous law. 



Yet another factor in the intellectual stir and bustle 

 of the time must needs be mentioned even in so short 

 and cursory a sketch as this of the causes which led to 

 the Darwinian crisis. In 1798, Thomas Malthus, a 

 clergyman of the Church of England, published the 

 first edition of his famous and much-debated c Essay on 

 the Principle of Population.' Malthus was the first 

 person who ever called public attention to the tendency 

 of population to increase up to the utmost limit of sub- 

 sistence, as well as to the necessary influence of starvation 

 in checking its further development beyond that point- 

 Though his essay dealt only with the question of repro- 

 duction in human societies, it was clear that ifc possessed 

 innumerable analogies in every domain of animal and 

 vegetable life. The book ran through many successive 

 editions with extraordinary rapidity for a work of its 

 class, it was fiercely attacked and bravely defended, 

 it caused an immense amount of discussion and debate, 

 and besides its marvellous direct influence as a germinal 

 power upon the whole subsequent course of politico- 

 economical and sociological thought, it produced also a 



