THE NEWER AND OLDER TELEOLOGY 99 



ADAPTATION AND NATURAL SEJiECTION 



I have preferred to show the influence of the 

 older teleology upon Natural History by quotations 

 from a single great and insufficiently appreciated 

 naturalist. It might have been seen equally well 

 in the pages of Kirby and Spence and those of 

 many other writers. If the older naturalists who 

 thought and spoke with Burchell of * the intention 

 of Nature ' and the adaptation of beings ' to each 

 other, and to the situations in which they are 

 found', could have conceived the possibility of 

 evolution, they must have been led, as Darwin 

 was, by the same considerations, to Natural Selec- 

 tion. This was impossible for them, because the 

 philosophy which they followed contemplated the 

 phenomena of adaptation as part of a static immu- 

 table system. Darwin, convinced that the system 

 is dynamic and mutable, was prevented by these 

 very phenomena from accepting anything short 

 of the crowning interpretation offered by Natural 

 Selection.^ And the birth of Darwin's unalterable 

 conviction that adaptation is of dominant import- 

 ance in the organic world, — a conviction confirmed 

 and ever again confirmed by his experience as 

 a naturalist— may probably be traced to the in- 



<■ ' I had always been much struck by such adai>tations [e. g. 

 •woodpecker and tree-frog for climbing, seeds for dispersal], and 

 until these could be explained it seemed to me almost useless to 

 endeavour to prove by indirect evidence that species have been 

 modified.' Autobiography in Life and Letters, i. 82. The same 

 thought is repeated again and again in Darwin's letters to his 

 friends. It is forcibly urged in the Introduction to the Origin 

 (1859), 3. 



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