Influence of Malthus 15 
Therefore, as far more important than any further ferreting out 
of vague hints of Natural Selection in books which Darwin never 
read, we would indicate by a quotation the view that the central 
idea in Darwinism is correlated with contemporary social evolution. 
“The substitution of Darwin for Paley as the chief interpreter of the 
order of nature is currently regarded as the displacement of an 
anthropomorphic view by a purely scientific one: a little reflection, 
however, will show that what has actually happened has been merely 
the replacement of the anthropomorphism of the eighteenth century 
by that of the nineteenth. For the place vacated by Paley’s theo- 
logical and metaphysical explanation has simply been occupied by 
that suggested to Darwin and Wallace by Malthus in terms of the 
prevalent severity of industrial competition, and those phenomena 
of the struggle for existence which the light of contemporary economic 
theory has enabled us to discern, have thus come to be temporarily 
exalted into a complete explanation of organic progress'.” It goes 
without saying that the idea suggested by Malthus was developed 
by Darwin into a biological theory which was then painstakingly 
verified by being used as an interpretative formula, and that the 
validity of a theory so established is not affected by what suggested 
it, but the practical question which this line of thought raises in the 
mind is this: if Biology did thus borrow with such splendid results 
from social theory, why should we not more deliberately repeat the 
experiment ? 
Darwin was characteristically frank and generous in admitting 
that the principle of Natural Selection had been independently 
recognised by Dr W. C. Wells in 1813 and by Mr Patrick Matthew in 
1831, but he had no knowledge of these anticipations when he 
published the first edition of The Origin of Species. Wells, whose 
“Essay on Dew” is still remembered, read in 1813 before the Royal 
Society a short paper entitled “An account of a White Female, part 
of whose skin resembles that of a Negro” (published in 1818). In 
this communication, as Darwin said, “he observes, firstly, that all 
animals tend to vary in some degree, and, secondly, that agriculturists 
improve their domesticated animals by selection ; and then, he adds, 
but what is done in this latter case ‘by art, seems to be done with 
equal efficacy, though more elowly fy nature, in the formation of 
varieties of mankind, fitted for the country which they inhabit*’” 
Thus Wells had the clear idea of survival dependent upon a favourable 
variation, but he makes no more use of the idea and applies it only 
to man. There is not in the paper the least hint that the author 
ever thought of generalising the remarkable sentence quoted above. 
Of Mr Patrick Matthew, who buried his treasure in an appendix 
1 P, Geddes, article ‘‘ Biology,’ Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, 
2 Origin of Species (6th edit.) p. xv. 
