142 EVOLUTIONISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 



but even the plants struggle among themselves for 

 soil, moisture, air, and light, and he connects this 

 with the idea which we have already seen expressed 

 by Buffon and Malthus, that this struggle checks 

 the naturally rapid increase of life, and thus is ad- 

 vantaoreous and beneficial in the end. As Dr. 

 Krause points out, Darwin just misses the connec- 

 tion between this struggle and the Survival of the 

 Fittest. 



These passages show that Dr. Darwin was at the 

 last — that is in his latest writings — a firm evolution- 

 ist, and that he had advanced considerably beyond 

 the tentative views expressed many years before in 

 the Zoonomia and Botanic Garden. Krause, in his ad- 

 mirable biography, does not, however, give Darwin's 

 predecessors sufficient credit ; his ideas, it is true, 

 were largely gathered from his own notes as a phy- 

 sician and as a lifelong observer of Nature, but they 

 indicate also a very careful reading of Leibnitz, as 

 in his allusion to the change of genera in the Am- 

 monites ; to Buffon, as in ideas connected with the 

 struggle for existence and variations under artificial 

 selection ; to Linn^us, Blumenthal, and others. 

 As to the origin of life, he drew from the Greeks, 

 especially from Aristotle, limiting spontaneous gen- 

 eration, however, to the lowest organisms ; they also 

 gave him the fundamental idea of Evolution, for he 

 says, " This idea of the gradual formation and im- 

 provement of the Animal world seems not to have 

 been unknown to the ancient philosophers." His 



