SELECTION: ORGANIC AND SOCIAL 183 



healthy escaped ; from enemies, the strongest, 

 the swiftest, or the most cunning ; from famine, 

 the best hmiters or those with the best digestion ; 

 and so on. Then it suddenly flashed upon me 

 that this self-acting process would necessarily 

 improve the race, because in every generation the 

 inferior would inevitably be killed ofi and the 

 superior — ^that is, the fittest — would survive. Then 

 at once I seemed to see the whole effect of this. ..." 

 His words in the 1858 paper were : " If any species 

 should produce a variety having shghtly increased 

 powers of preserving existence, that variety must 

 inevitably in time acquire a superiority in numbers." 

 Thus, for the second time, from the domain of 

 himaan society the idea of natural selection was 

 suggested. 



Perhaps the suggestion was made a third time, 

 for it is an interesting fact that in 1852 — six years 

 before the theory of natural selection was launched 

 by Darwin and Wallace, when Herbert Spencer 

 wrote his famous evolutionist article on " The 

 Development Hypothesis," he pubhshed another 

 important essay entitled, " A Theory of Popula- 

 tion," toward the close of which he came within an 

 ace of recognising that the struggle for existence 

 was a factor in organic evolution. Spencer was 

 not guilty of reading much, but it would be striking 

 if he too had been stimulated by Malthus. In any 

 case we have the fact that, at a time when pressure 

 of population was practically interesting men's 

 minds, Darwin, Wallace, and Spencer were in- 

 dependently led towards a theory of organic 

 evolution. There could be no better illustration 

 of the Comtian thesis that science is a social 

 phenomenon. Prof. Patrick Geddes suggests that 



