xxii Preface 



by the eminent Russian zoologist, Prof essor Kessler, 

 formerly dean of the University of St. Petersburg. 

 Like so many valuable contributions to science 

 published only in the Russian language, however, 

 it remained almost entirely unknown to the out- 

 side world, and it was not until the next decade 

 that one of his disciples. Prince Kropotkin, de- 

 veloped his ideas and made them available for 

 English readers in a series of remarkable articles 

 in the Nineteenth Century, afterwards reprinted 

 in book form as Mutual Aid a Factor of Evolution. 

 Later, the subject was still further developed by 

 another Russian thinker and worker of genius, 

 Novikov (French: Novicow), formerly vice- 

 president of the International Institute of Soci- 

 ology, whose score of volumes on social theory 

 mark the beginning of a new epoch in the social 

 sciences. Unfortunately, Novikov, unlike his 

 predecessors Kessler and Kropotkin, did not realize 

 that he had the authority of Darwin upon his 

 side, and includes him in the crushing criticism 

 which he directs against the distorted "social 

 Darwinism" that has come to represent the social 

 applications of the theory of evolution so largely 

 in modem thought. 



The misunderstanding of Darwin's social theory 

 is so widespread, and his writings on the subject 

 are so little known, that I have thought it desir- 

 able to state his theory of social progress as far 

 as possible in his own words, and to include in the 

 present volume a large number of representative 



