Darwinism

Darwinism

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Darwinism (1889), by Alfred Russel
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Title: Darwinism (1889)
Author: Alfred Russel Wallace
Release Date: January 2, 2005 [EBook #14558]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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DARWINISM (1889) ***

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DARWINISM
AN EXPOSITION OF THE
THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION

WITH SOME OF ITS APPLICATIONS
BY
ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE
LL.D., F.L.S., ETC.
WITH A PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR, MAP AND
ILLUSTRATIONS
MACMILLAN AND CO. LONDON AND NEW YORK [Second
Edition] 1889
* * * * *
[Illustration: Alfred R. Wallace]
* * * * *

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
The present edition is a reprint of the first, with a few verbal
corrections and the alteration of some erroneous or doubtful statements.
Of these latter the following are the most important:--
P. 30. The statement as to the fulmar petrel, which Professor A.
Newton assures me is erroneous, has been modified.
P. 34. A note is added as to Darwin's statement about the missel and
song-thrushes in Scotland.
P. 172. An error as to the differently-coloured herds of cattle in the
Falkland Islands, is corrected.
PARKSTONE, DORSET August, 1889.

PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION
The present work treats the problem of the Origin of Species on the
same general lines as were adopted by Darwin; but from the standpoint
reached after nearly thirty years of discussion, with an abundance of
new facts and the advocacy of many new or old theories.
While not attempting to deal, even in outline, with the vast subject of
evolution in general, an endeavour has been made to give such an
account of the theory of Natural Selection as may enable any intelligent
reader to obtain a clear conception of Darwin's work, and to understand
something of the power and range of his great principle.
Darwin wrote for a generation which had not accepted evolution, and
which poured contempt on those who upheld the derivation of species
from species by any natural law of descent. He did his work so well
that "descent with modification" is now universally accepted as the
order of nature in the organic world; and the rising generation of
naturalists can hardly realise the novelty of this idea, or that their
fathers considered it a scientific heresy to be condemned rather than
seriously discussed.
The objections now made to Darwin's theory apply, solely, to the
particular means by which the change of species has been brought
about, not to the fact of that change. The objectors seek to minimise the
agency of natural selection and to subordinate it to laws of variation, of
use and disuse, of intelligence, and of heredity. These views and
objections are urged with much force and more confidence, and for the
most part by the modern school of laboratory naturalists, to whom the
peculiarities and distinctions of species, as such, their distribution and
their affinities, have little interest as compared with the problems of
histology and embryology, of physiology and morphology. Their work
in these departments is of the greatest interest and of the highest
importance, but it is not the kind of work which, by itself, enables one
to form a sound judgment on the questions involved in the action of the
law of natural selection. These rest mainly on the external and vital
relations of species to species in a state of nature--on what has been
well termed by Semper the "physiology of organisms," rather than on

the anatomy or physiology of organs.
* * * * *
It has always been considered a weakness in Darwin's work that he
based his theory, primarily, on the evidence of variation in
domesticated animals and cultivated plants. I have endeavoured to
secure a firm foundation for the theory in the variations of organisms in
a state of nature; and as the exact amount and precise character of these
variations is of paramount importance in the numerous problems that
arise when we apply the theory to explain the facts of nature, I have
endeavoured, by means of a series of diagrams, to exhibit to the eye the
actual variations as they are found to exist in a sufficient number of
species. By doing this, not only does the reader obtain a better and
more precise idea of variation than can be given by any number of
tabular statements or cases of extreme individual variation, but we
obtain a basis of fact by which to test the statements and objections
usually put forth on