Pre-Darwinian Hints of Natural Selection 17 
finds in Prichard’s work a recognition of the operation of Natural 
Selection. “After inquiring how it is that ‘these varieties are de- 
veloped and preserved in connexion with particular climates and 
differences of local situation,’ he gives the following very significant 
answer : ‘One cause which tends to maintain this relation is obvious. 
Individuals and families, and even whole colonies, perish and dis- 
appear in climates for which they are, by peculiarity of constitution, 
not adapted. Of this fact proofs have been already mentioned.” Mr 
Francis Darwin and Prof. A. C. Seward discuss Prichard’s “anticipa- 
tions” in More Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. 1. p. 43, and come to 
the conclusion that the evolutionary passages are entirely neutralised 
by others of an opposite trend. There is the same difficulty with 
Buffon. 
Hints of the idea of Natural Selection have been detected else- 
where. James Watt’, for instance, has been reported as one of the 
anticipators (1851). But we need not prolong the inquiry further, 
since Darwin did not know of any anticipations until after he had 
published the immortal work of 1859, and since none of those who 
got hold of the idea made any use of it. What Darwin did was to 
follow the clue which Malthus gave him, to realise, first by genius and 
afterwards by patience, how the complex and subtle struggle for 
existence works out a natural selection of those organisms which 
vary in the direction of fitter adaptation to the conditions of their 
life. So much success attended his application of the Selection- 
formula that for a time he regarded Natural Selection as almost the 
sole factor in evolution, variations being pre-supposed ; gradually, 
however, he came to recognise that there was some validity in the 
factors which had been emphasized by Lamarck and by Buffon, and in 
his well-known summing up in the sixth edition of the Origin he says 
of the transformation of species: “This has been effected chiefly 
through the natural selection of numerous successive, slight, favour- 
able variations; aided in an important manner by the inherited 
effects of the use and disuse of parts; and in an unimportant manner, 
that is, in relation to adaptive structures, whether past or present, 
by the direct action of external conditions, and by variations which 
seem to us in our ignorance to arise spontaneously.” 
To sum up: the idea of organic evolution, older than Aristotle, 
slowly developed from the stage of suggestion to the stage of verifi- 
cation, and the first convincing verification was Darwin's ; from being 
an a priori anticipation it has become an interpretation of nature, 
and Darwin is still the chief interpreter ; from being a modal interpre- 
tation it has advanced to the rank of a causal theory, the most 
convincing part of which men will never cease to call Darwinism. 
1 See Prof. Patrick Geddes’s article “Variation and Selection,” Encyclopaedia 
Britannica (9th edit.) 1888, . 
D. 
