EVOLUTION 15 



The distinction between Evolution and Darwinism, 

 although constantly pointed out, still seems to me to 

 require emphasizing — not only in justice to Spencer, but 

 also with a view to stimulate further inquiry into the 

 possibility of extending the Darwinian principle of Selec- 

 tion or Survival to departments of Evolution to which 

 it has not yet been applied. For example, a most highly 

 suggestive hypothesis appl5dng the principle of the sur- 

 vival of stable mechanical systems of corpuscles or 

 electrons to the evolution of the atoms of the chemical 

 elements was advanced by Sir George Darwin in 

 1905.1 



Strictly and equitably considered it must be admitted 

 that Darwin's influence upon those fields of Evolution 

 in which the principle of Selection does not or has not yet 

 been proved to hold good has been of an indirect character. 

 I venture to think that an impartial consideration of the 

 achievements of the two great pioneers is hardly possible 

 now, for their work has been accomplished so near our 

 own times that we are as yet unable to obtain a correct 

 perspective view of their relative positions. In what may 

 be called non-selectional Evolution, Spencer must cer- 

 tainly be credited with as much direct influence as was 

 produced by Darwin upon organic' Evolution, although 

 of course the possibility must always be borne in mind 



wrote to Spencer : ' I rejoice that you have made a beginning, and such 

 a beginning — for the more I think about it the more important it 

 seems to me that somebody should think out into a connected system 

 the loose notions that are floating about more or less distinctly in all 

 the best minds. It seems as if all the thoughts in what you have written 

 were my own, and yet I am conscious of the enormous dt£ference your 

 presentation of them makes in my intellectual state. One is thought 

 in the state of hemp yarn, and the other in the state of rope. V^^ork 

 away then excellent rope-maker. ..." Life and Letters of Huxley, vol. i, 

 p. 213. 



^ British Assoc. Rep. South Africa, 1905, pp. 10-14. Crookes also, 

 in his Presidential Address to Sect. B of the British Association at 

 Birmingham in 1886, advanced arguments in favour of the evolution 

 of the chemical elements from ' protyle ', but no mechanism was 

 suggested. Lockyer has marshalled the astro-physical evidence in 

 his work on ' Inorganic Evolution ', 1900. 



