NATURAL SELECTION 385 



place from all the others. The author of this hypothesis evidently 

 considers it a distinct improvement upon the views of Lamarck, 

 which he very briefly discusses. He thinks that Lamarck attributes 

 too much importance to the principle of use and disuse, which he 

 regards as "obviously insufficient to account for the great grades 

 of organization," though he admits that external conditions may 

 have been " a means of producing the exterior characters." 

 There can be little doubt, however, that, in relying upon a system 

 of more or less definite and continuously operating natural 

 causes as factors of organic evolution, Lamarck took up a far 

 more scientific position than Robert Chambers. 



In insisting upon the great importance of Natural Selection as 

 a factor in organic evolution, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel 

 Wallace made a great advance upon the position of any of their 

 predecessors. 



We have seen in the last chapter that this principle had been 

 hinted at by more than one writer about the close of the eighteenth 

 and the commencement of the nineteenth centuries, and that it 

 can even be traced back to the philosophy of ancient Greece. In 

 the historical sketch which prefaces the later editions of the 

 " Origin of Species," Charles Darwin himself quotes a translation 

 from Aristotle which shows sufficiently clearly that the idea was 

 familiar to the great Greek biologist. In the same sketch he 

 also quotes a passage from Dr. W. C. Wells, from a paper read 

 before the Royal Society in 1813, in which the same principle is 

 recognized in the most explicit and unmistakable manner. 



It was not, however, until the year 1858 that the part played 

 by natural selection in organic evolution began to be gene- 

 rally understood. In that year Sir Charles Lyell and Dr. J. D. 

 Hooker communicated to the Linnean Society certain papers, 1 

 written by Darwin and Wallace, which at once called prominent 

 attention to the importance of this factor and contained the 

 essential parts of the theory of natural selection as subsequently 

 developed by both these writers. 



Darwin's paper consisted of an extract from his as yet 

 unpublished work, together with an abstract of a letter to 



1 These papers have been reprinted by the Linnean Society in the volume pub- 

 lished in connection with the Darwin-Wallace Celebration held on July 1st, 1908, 

 and it is from this volume that the quotations which follow are taken. 



B. CO 



