108 WALTER KIDD^ M.D., i'.Z.S., ON 



might have been its reception ! That species of plants and 

 anin\als were mutable was well enoug-h known before the 

 " fifties " through the marvellous divergencies produced by 

 breeding from the original wild stocks of horses, cattle^ 

 sheep, dogs, and from those of fruit-bearing trees and 

 cereals. But origin was the title, and it threw down the 

 challenge at once to older views and was on that account 

 the more calculated to capture the restless mind of modern 

 man. 



2. The theatre in which Darwin claimed that this origin 

 had occurred Avas the supposed struggle for existence. 

 Here the obvious competition for means of livelihood and 

 comfort raging among individuals and races of men, Avhich 

 had given rise to the remarkable essay on population by a 

 clergyman named Malthus, w^as read into that struggle for 

 existence among the low^er forms of life which it was purely 

 gratuitous to postulate. It ought to have been enough for 

 the more candid and reasonable exponents of Darwinism 

 to see that to talk of struggle for life between lower plants 

 and animals, especially in that region which so much struck 

 Darwin's imagination, viz., the survival of certain individual 

 seeds out of a single plant, or of certain ova out of the- 

 milhon in each herring, was an unwarrantable liberty in the 

 use of language. 



3. The ]iow familiar term Natural Selection w^as an 

 inappropriate reading of a word, instinct wdth human 

 purpose and will, iuto a process assumed and stated to be 

 no more purposeful than the wind that blow^s, to use the 

 simile of Darwin himself. This aspect of the familiar term 

 has been forcibly pointed out by the late Duke of Argyll, 

 and by strict logic and use of terms he w^as well justified,, 

 but it is held that the term is only the best that occurred 

 to Darwin, and no sinister design of deluding the unwaiy 

 is wrapped up in it. Professor Poulton has attacked the 

 Duke rather bitterly in a work on Charles Darwin, for what 

 he declares to be captious criticism. 



4. The fourth great term in the evolutionist vocabulary is 

 Mr. Herbert Spencer's equivalent for Natural Selection, viz., 

 Survival of the Fittest. This resembles the other three in 

 looseness and ambiguity, and the latter quality is acknow- 

 ledged by Huxley. 



The new meaning of the Survival of the Fittest has now 

 to be taken to be " fittest to survive," or " fittest for the- 

 environment." It really might be rendered "w^hatever is,. 



