Progress of Botany. 47 



Spencer, not as an expert naturalist, but as a logician and 

 philosopher, having the facts before him, while avowing 

 himself an evolutionist, thought that environment and 

 functional use were far more influential than variation. 

 Other thinkers also demanded that the term " fittest " 

 should be defined. What was a priori to be regarded as 

 fittest ? They pointed out that Darwin reasoned in a 

 circle — his whole argument assuming that that was fittest 

 which survived. Not always the strongest and likeliest 

 individual, they showed, got a chance to survive. The 

 porpoise, when the opportunity presents itself, seizes the 

 biggest, not the smallest herring ; and the moth in selecting 

 a cabbage leaf on which to lay its eggs, alights not on the 

 worst in the garden. Darwin admitted in a later work 

 that he probably attributed too much to the action of 

 natural selection, or survival of the fittest. Speaking of 

 structures now useless, he said, " such structures cannot 

 be accounted for by any form of selection or by the 

 inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts." He 

 yielded up to criticism that his principle was less im- 

 portant than he had thought it. It is still a disputed 

 question whether variations are insensibly minute or 

 saltative, nor is it settled whether they are impressed 

 upon the organism by influences exerted from without, 

 or from causes operating from within the germ cell. 



The general outcome of the discussions which took 

 place in scientific circles undoubtedly was to gain many 

 disciples to the side of evolution. Huxley, *Wallace and 

 Spencer held to it. Tyndal, the great physicist, became 

 a champion of the theory. It was he who, in his famous 

 Belfast address as President of the British Association, 



*Dr. "Wallace, now in his eighty-first year, has gone back from evolution pure and 

 simple and entirely dissents from the views of Herbert Spencer and others who hold 

 that man's natural and moral nature is the product of force alone. He declares his belief 

 in the spiritual nature of man and holds " that we possess intellectual and moral faculties 

 which could not have been developed by natural selection, but must have had another 

 origin ; and for this origin we can only find an adequate cause in the universe of spirit." 



