HERBERT SPENCER AND 

 ANIMAL EVOLUTION 



The subject I have chosen for the title of my lecture 

 is a very large one, Herbert Spencer and Animal Evolu- 

 tion. It is impossible for me to attempt to deal with 

 the whole or even with any considerable part of it in 

 the course of a single lecture. But before I treat of that 

 very limited aspect of it to which I propose to confine 

 myself, I may, perhaps, indulge in a few generalities by 

 way of an introduction. 



During the last two years we have heard a great deal 

 about Evolution, because of the various celebrations held 

 in different places of the centenary of Darwin's birth, and 

 because in July 1908 we arrived at the fiftieth anniversary 

 of the famous meeting of the Linnean Society of London, 

 at which the papers of Charles Darwin and Alfred 

 Russell Wallace were read, suggesting Natural Selection 

 as the efficient cause of the transformation of animal 

 and vegetal species. And November 24 was the fiftieth 

 anniversary of the publication of Darwin's Origin of 

 Species. It is a popular error, but one which I need not 

 be at the trouble to refute here, before an Oxford audience, 

 that Darwin was the author of the theory of Evolution. 

 We know that the idea of evolution dates back to the 

 early Greek philosophers ; that a scheme of organic 

 evolution founded upon Greek philosophy was sketched 

 by Lucretius ; that evolutionary doctrines were freely 

 promulgated in the eighteenth century, by Leibnitz, 

 Malebranche, Benoit de Maillet, and other philosophers, 

 by Haller the physiologist, by Bonnet, Buffon, Wolff, and 

 other zoologists ; at the close of the century by Erasmus 

 Darwin, and in the earliest years of the nineteenth 

 century by Oken, Treviranus, Lamarck, only to mention 

 a few names. 



