44 EVOLUTION -^ 



sinuous sliape by constant wriggling through the grass of 

 the meadows. Charles Darwin improved upon all that by 

 liis suggestive hint of survival of the fittest, and in so far, 

 but in so far alone, ho became the real father of modern 

 biological evolutionism. 



From the days of Lamarck, to the day when Charles 

 Darwin himself pul)lished his wonderful ' Origin of Species,' 

 this idea that plants and animals might really have grown, 

 instead of having been made all of a piece, kept brewing 

 everywhere in the minds and brains of scientilic thinkers. 

 The notions which to the outside public were startlingly 

 new when Darwin's book took the world by storm, were 

 old indeed to the thinkers and workers who had long been 

 familiar with the principle of descent with modification 

 and the speculatioiiS of the Lichfield doctor or the Paris 

 philosopher. Long before Darwin wrote his great work, 

 Herbert Spencer had put forth in plain language every 

 idea which the drawing-room biologists attributed to Darwin. 

 The supporters of the development hypothesis, he said seven 

 years earlier — yes, he called it the ' development hypo- 

 thesis ' in so many words — ' can show that modification has 

 effected and is effecting great changes in all organisms, 

 subject to modifying influences.' They can show, he 

 goes on (if I may venture to condense so great a thinker), 

 that any existing plant or animal, placed under new con- 

 ditions, begins to undergo adaptive changes of form and 

 structure ; that in successive generations these changes 

 continue, till the plant or animal acquires totally new 

 habits ; that in cultivated plants and domesticated animals 

 changes of the sort habitually occur ; that the diffe- 

 rences thus caused, as for example in dogs, are often 

 greater than those on which species in the wild state are 

 founded, and that throughout all organic nature there is 

 at work a modifying influence of the same sort as that 



