568 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. VI., No. 151. 



discouraging and humiliating to any one who 

 has high hopes of the intellectual development of 

 mankind. 



Mr. Bonar's book will, it is to be hoped, tend 

 to remove one of the causes of this persistent 

 failure to understand Malthus, which, it is chari- 

 table to suppose, has been operative in the case 

 of Mr. Nossig, as it has been in that of better men. 

 The simple task of reading what Malthus wrote is 

 one which his critics have frequently omitted to 

 perform. Mr. Bonar adduces the striking instance 

 of no less a man than Nassau William Senior, 

 who "confessed with penitence that he had 

 trusted more to his ears than to his eyes for a 

 knowledge of Malthusian doctrine, and had written 

 a learned criticism, not of the opinion of Mr. 

 Malthus, but of that which ' the multitudes who 

 have followed, and the few who have endeavored 

 to oppose,' Mr. Malthus assumed to be his opinion." 

 Now, Mr. Bonar's book may be expected to have, 

 in two ways, some effect in removing this kind of 

 ignorance : for, on the one hand, he gives a suffi- 

 ciently full account, not only of Malthus' theory, 

 but of his book, to show that Malthus had con- 

 sidered the subject from every point of view, and 

 had collected and discussed with pre-eminent 

 sagacity a large array of facts affecting and 

 affected by his doctrine of population ; and, on 

 the other hand, his account of the history of the 

 book and its author is calculated to awaken suffi- 

 cient interest to lead many to read Malthus him- 

 self. 



A few specimens of Mr. Nossig's work will serve 

 to illustrate its character. " The methods and the 

 economic stand-point of Malthus may be recog- 

 nized from the way in which he groups the sub- 

 jects of his investigation. On the one side he 

 places man and his tendency to multiply ; on the 

 other, the earth and its productivity. These 

 ideas he isolates, without recognizing a reciprocal 

 influence between man and the soil.'" It would 

 not be a gross exaggeration to say that there is 

 scarcely a page of Malthus in which this reciprocal 

 influence is not recognized. Malthus continually 

 considers the power of agricultural and social im- 

 provement to increase the productivity of a given 

 territory ; but he continually insists that it is im- 

 possible for this power to keep pace for a long 

 period with the increase of population, which 

 would result from a state of general comfort, 

 without the presence on a large scale of preventive 

 or destructive checks. 



Nossig goes on to say that it was in this 

 way easy for Malthus to deduce that "simple 

 mathematical scheme which, among others of 

 his followers, John Stuart Mill accepted. This 

 distinguished thinker, however, who so clearly 



expounded the difference between the various 

 methods of sociological investigation, . . . over- 

 looked (hatte iXbersehen ! f) the fact that his master 

 based his whole theory upon the erroneous geo- 

 metrical method. " The idea of Mill's ' overlooking ' 

 the fact that the Malthusian theory, which he ac- 

 cepted, was based upon a method he condemned, is 

 ridiculous. The notion that it was based upon the 

 ' geometrical method ' has no logical foundation 

 whatever, and has for its sole apparent origin the 

 fact — an unfortunate one, as Malthusians in gen- 

 eral will admit — that Malthus gave a conspicuous 

 place in his exposition to a mathematical expres- 

 sion which was intended rather to facilitate the 

 comprehension of the effects with which he was 

 dealing than to convey any thing like an exact 

 statement of the phenomena. But taking the 

 matter at its worst, and supposing (what is thor- 

 oughly false) that the contrast of the geometrical 

 increase of population with the arithmetical in- 

 crease of foodw^ere an essential part of the Malthu- 

 sian doctrine, there is not the faintest trace of the 

 ' geometrical method ' in the mode by which Mal- 

 thus arrived at it. He deduced his law of popula- 

 tion from observation of man and the world. 



Mr. Nossig finds it no harder to explain Dar- 

 win's than Mill's acceptance of Malthus' views : 

 " Darwin was no sociologist, and in the theory of 

 Malthus he saw only a detached item (moment) 

 of actual natural relations ; hence he accepted 

 it." Space will not permit us to show how Mr. 

 Nossig misapprehends Darwin's own doctrines, 

 and misapplies his misapprehensions to Malthus ; 

 but the reader will probably absolve lis from the 

 duty of detailed criticism of a writer who thinks 

 he is saying something relevant to the Malthusian 

 problem when he cites the fact that while in two 

 years a human pair can at most double their num- 

 bers, a grain of wheat can in the same time be in- 

 creased a thousand-fold, and thereupon inquires, 

 " Does there, then, actually exist in nature the ten- 

 dency to make the products which serve for the 

 nourishment of human organisms multiply less 

 rapidly than these organisms?" But if any 

 one thinks that the commission of this favorite 

 betise of anti-Malthusians is in some way pardona- 

 ble, he may perhaps find himself able to de- 

 termine the genus of writers to which Mr. Nossig 

 belongs by the following passage in the construc- 

 tive portion of his production. In the formulas 

 E denotes the ' evolution ' of the human society in 

 question, g denotes the social force of gravitation 

 (or conservatism), and T the force which is ' repre- 

 sented by the struggle for existence : ' 



' ' We know that E=f{T,g). Now, T is a func- 

 tion of the reproductive force R, which function 

 we shall express by 6, so T=(t> (R): hence E = 



