68o 
Analyses of Books. 
[November, 
The arguments both of the friends and the opponents of evolu- 
tion would have been drowned among the din of organised 
factions, the orations of itinerant Jack Cades, and the cheers of 
a multitude rushing violently down a steep place into ? 
We find here Alfred Russel Wallace spoken of as “ a young 
Welsh biologist.” This is surely a mistake. The name 
Wallace, as well as the prcenomina, are assuredly not Welsh, 
and, to the best of our recollection, Mr. Wallace was not born in 
the Principality. 
Concerning the respective merit due to Darwin, Wallace, 
Wells, Matthew, and Spencer, Mr. Allen writes : “ It was 
Darwin’s task to recognise the universal where Wells and 
Spencer had seen only the particular ; to build up a vast and 
irresistible induCtive system, where Matthew and Wallace had 
but thrown out a pregnant hint of wonderful interest and 
suggestiveness. 
We come now to what appears to us a grave error. Mr. 
Allen writes : “ For the world is perpetually overpopulated. It 
is not, as many good people imagine, shortly going to be over- 
populated ; it is now, it has always been, and it always will be, 
pressed close up to the utmost limits of population.” If the 
world had always been overpopulated, how did it happen that 
children were regarded not as a burden but as a blessing ? How 
came it that, in the days of Queen Elizabeth, as Hallam shows 
in his “ Constitutional History of England,” the wages of a 
working-man represented a larger proportion of the necessaries 
of life than they do in our progressive days ? What, lastly, has 
become of “ the full-blooded tendency of the eighteenth century ” 
which Mr. Allen himself mentions ? Even in the lower animals, 
where Mr. Allen is nearer the truth than with respeCt to man, 
we find that certain wild species must have fearfully increased. 
Again the author considers that most people “ misunderstand 
the meaning of the phrase ‘ struggle for existence.’ They 
imagine that the struggle is chiefly conducted between different 
species, whereas it is chiefly conducted between members of the 
same species.” But what exterminated the native flora and 
fauna of St. Helena ? The goat. What is laying waste South 
Africa, so that a troop of the Cape Mounted Rifles actually 
cheered on meeting with a tree when on the march ? The goat. 
What are fast eradicating the interesting native floras of West 
Australia and California ? European weeds. These and other 
instances on the large scale show that there is a most desperate 
struggle between different species, and that this struggle, when 
it becomes sufficiently intensified, instead of forming new 
varieties or species, leads to their extermination. 
Mr. Allen’s work deserves careful perusal by all who would 
wish to form a truer estimate of Darwin than that which they 
might gather from the works of Mr. S. Butler. 
