Goethe and other Pioneers of Evolution 13 
the finest expression that science has yet known—if it has known 
it—of the kernel-idea of what is called “bathmism,” the idea of an 
“inherent growth-force”—and at the same time he held that “the 
way of life powerfully reacts upon all form” and that the orderly 
growth of form “yields to change from externally acting causes.” 
Besides Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, Treviranus, and 
Goethe, there were other “pioneers of evolution,’ whose views have 
been often discussed and appraised. Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire 
(1772—1844), whose work Goethe so much admired, was on the whole 
Buffonian, emphasising the direct action of the changeful milieu. 
“Species vary with their environment, and existing species have 
descended by modification from earlier and somewhat simpler species.” 
He had a glimpse of the ‘selection idea, and believed in mutations or 
sudden leaps—induced in the embryonic condition by external in- 
fluences. The complete history of evolution-theories will include 
many instances of guesses at truth which were afterwards sub- 
stantiated, thus the geographer von Buch (1773—1853) detected the 
importance of the Isolation factor on which Wagner, Romanes, Gulick 
and others have laid great stress, but we must content ourselves with 
recalling one other pioneer, the author of the Vestiges of Creation 
(1844), a work which passed through ten editions in nine years and 
certainly helped to harrow the soil for Darwin’s sowing. As Darwin 
said, “it did excellent service in this country in calling attention 
to the subject, in removing prejudice, and in thus preparing the 
ground for the reception of analogous views'.” Its author, Robert 
Chambers (1802—1871) was in part a Buffonian—maintaining that 
environment moulded organisms adaptively, and in part a Goethian— 
believing in an inherent progressive impulse which lifted organisms 
from one grade of organisation to another. 
As regards Natural Selection. 
The only thinker to whom Darwin was directly indebted, so far 
as the theory of Natural Selection is concerned, was Malthus, and we 
may once more quote the well-known passage in the Autobiography : 
“In October, 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my 
systematic enquiry, I happened to read for amusement ‘Malthus 
on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle 
for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observa- 
tion of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that 
under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be 
preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this 
would be the formation of new species”.” 
Although Malthus gives no adumbration of the idea of Natural 
1 Origin of Species (6th edit.), p. xvii. 
2 The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. 1. p. 83. London, 1887. 
