II : DARWIN AND THE THEORY OF 

 NATURAL SELECTION 



IN no case is the philosophical rule that terms 

 must first be defined before argument can be 

 entered upon more valuable, indeed essential, 

 than in the case of what is called, though often 

 incorrectly, Darwinism. As has been pointed out 

 time and again, there are three or four conceptions 

 included under this name, only one of which really 

 merits the appellation. The idea which first rises 

 to the mind of the ordinary person when Darwin- 

 ism is mentioned is that of transformism or the 

 derivation of one species of living things from 

 some other species, putting the doctrine in its 

 crudest possible form for the purpose of easy 

 recognition. Of this theory Darwin neither was 

 nor ever claimed to be the parent. Apart from the 

 long list of non-Catholic authors cited in the 

 various books and articles dealing with Darwin's 

 predecessors, there are also, as Mivart* and 

 Wasmann,f have shown, a number of Catholic 

 authorities, including St. Augustine, St. Thomas 

 Aquinas, Suarez, Cornelius a Lapide and that 

 very distinguished Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher 

 (who first suggested the germ-origin of disease), 

 who have alluded with approval to a transformistic 

 explanation of nature as we know it. What Darwin 



* Genesis of Species, pp. 303 et seq. 



t Modern Biology and the Theory of Evolution, p. 276 and Note. 



