ANIMAL EVOLUTION 5 



part played b y Herbert Spencer, w ho, as a public exponent 

 of organjc^jyliition, was in t|i<^ fie](; ^ som p ypar<; hpfnrp 

 DarwuT wrote, and had antic ipated some of his leading 

 ideas. Spencer "313" not arrive at the idea of Natural 

 SeTection ; that was first conceived by Darwin, jointly 

 made public by Darwin and Wallace, and freely accepted 

 by Spencer as conforming to and strengthenin g his 

 scheme of organic evolution. 



1 have been speaking of Herbert Spencer as a biologist ; 

 to most persons he appears as a philosopher, who got his 

 biological knowledge at second hand and wove the 

 discoveries and opinions of other biologists into the fabric 

 of his philosophical system. He has been accused of 

 borrowing his zoology from Huxley, his botany from 

 Hooker. It cannot be denied that there is a grain of 

 truth in this accusation. The author of the Synthetic 

 Philosophy could not have completed his task — he could 

 scarcely have begun it — if he had attempted to undertake 

 the laborious and time-consuming labours of an original 

 investigator of natural phenomena, or even if he had 

 attempted to verify by personal experience any consider- 

 able part of the evidence collected and handled in the 

 two volumes of his Principles of Biology. 'But he spared 

 no pains to make his knowledge exact. If he was not an 

 original investigator, he was a conscientious student, and 

 attended the lectures and the practical courses of the 

 most eminent biological teachers of his lime. His 

 knowledge of biological literature was great — and it is 

 a very abundant literature — his grasp of facts was unusual 

 and his insight unequalled. His power of co-ordinating 

 the evidence derived from the most different branches 

 of biological studies was equal to that of Darwin himself, 

 and his treatment of it led him to nearly identical con- 

 clusions. In some matters he anticipated Darwin's ideas. 

 In particular, his theory of ' physiological units ' was 

 an anticipation of Darwin's theory of pangenesis, and 

 the parent of all the various theories of vital units, 



