354 FROM THE GREEKS TO DARWIN 



presented itself to Empedocles, Democritus and 

 Anaxagoras, and second, as it became connected 

 with Causation in the minds of Aristotle, Buff on, 

 Kant, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe and Charles 

 Darwin. Around the solution of this problem we 

 have seen center the development and clarifica- 

 tion of four conceptions: environment, struggle 

 for existence, variation, survival of the fittest. 



We have seen first how ideas of Adaptation in 

 immutable types were recast into the grander 

 Adaptation in mutable types under changing en- 

 vironment, and how the full modern conception 

 of Adaptation arose slowly through philosophi- 

 cal anatomy and embryology as pursued by Buf- 

 fon, Kant, Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, Goethe, 

 Treviranus, Geoffroy and Serres. The signifi- 

 cance of degeneration and of vestigial structures 

 meanwhile grew clear in the interpretations of 

 Sylvius, Buffon, Kant, Goethe and Lamarck. 



Adaptation as arising from trial and error, 

 that is through fortuitous combinations and acci- 

 dental variations in relation to the survival of 

 the fittest, is found to be one of the most ancient 

 scientific ideas of which we have record in his- 

 tory. It is seen to follow two lines. The first is 

 the survival of the fittest forms or types of life 

 as conceived by Empedocles, considered either 

 as a whole, or as a collection of similar individ- 

 uals, or as a 'variety,' in modern terms. This we 



