Evolution in Modern Thought | Page 8

not in the paper the least hint that the
author ever thought of generalising the remarkable sentence quoted

above.
Of Mr. Patrick Matthew, who buried his treasure in an appendix to a
work on Naval Timber and Arboriculture, Darwin said that "he clearly
saw the full force of the principle of natural selection." In 1860 Darwin
wrote--very characteristically--about this to Lyell: "Mr. Patrick
Matthew publishes a long extract from his work on Naval Timber and
Arboriculture, published in 1831, in which he briefly but completely
anticipates the theory of Natural Selection. I have ordered the book, as
some passages are rather obscure, but it is certainly, I think, a complete
but not developed anticipation. Erasmus always said that surely this
would be shown to be the case some day. Anyhow, one may be excused
in not having discovered the fact in a work on Naval Timber."[30]
De Quatrefages and De Varigny have maintained that the botanist
Naudin stated the theory of evolution by natural selection in 1852. He
explains very clearly the process of artificial selection, and says that in
the garden we are following Nature's method. "We do not think that
Nature has made her species in a different fashion from that in which
we proceed ourselves in order to make our variations." But, as Darwin
said, "he does not show how selection acts under nature." Similarly it
must be noted in regard to several pre-Darwinian pictures of the
struggle for existence (such as Herder's, who wrote in 1790 "All is in
struggle ... each one for himself" and so on), that a recognition of this is
only the first step in Darwinism.
Profs. E. Perrier and H. F. Osborn have called attention to a remarkable
anticipation of the selection-idea which is to be found in the
speculations of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1825-1828) on the
evolution of modern Crocodilians from the ancient Teleosaurs.
Changing environment induced changes in the respiratory system and
far-reaching consequences followed. The atmosphere, acting upon the
pulmonary cells, brings about "modifications which are favourable or
destructive ('funestes'); these are inherited, and they influence all the
rest of the organisation of the animal because if these modifications
lead to injurious effects the animals which exhibit them perish and are
replaced by others of a somewhat different form, a form changed so as

to be adapted to (à la convenance) the new environment."
Prof. E. B. Poulton[31] has shown that the anthropologist James
Cowles Prichard (1786-1848) must be included even in spite of himself
among the precursors of Darwin. In some passages of the second
edition of his Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (1826),
he certainly talks evolution and anticipates Prof. Weismann in denying
the transmission of acquired characters. He is, however, sadly
self-contradictory and his evolutionism weakens in subsequent
editions--the only ones that Darwin saw. Prof. Poulton finds in
Prichard's work a recognition of the operation of Natural Selection.
"After inquiring how it is that 'these varieties are developed and
preserved in connexion with particular climates and differences of local
situation,' he gives the following very significant answer: 'One cause
which tends to maintain this relation is obvious. Individuals and
families, and even whole colonies perish and disappear in climates for
which they are, by peculiarity of constitution, not adapted. Of this fact
proofs have been already mentioned.'" Mr. Francis Darwin and Prof. A.
C. Seward discuss Prichard's "anticipations" in More Letters of Charles
Darwin, Vol. I. p. 43, and come to the conclusion that the evolutionary
passages are entirely neutralised by others of an opposite trend. There
is the same difficulty with Buffon.
Hints of the idea of Natural Selection have been detected elsewhere.
James Watt,[32] for instance, has been reported as one of the
anticipators (1851). But we need not prolong the inquiry further, since
Darwin did not know of any anticipations until after he had published
the immortal work of 1859, and since none of those who got hold of the
idea made any use of it. What Darwin did was to follow the clue which
Malthus gave him, to realise, first by genius and afterwards by patience,
how the complex and subtle struggle for existence works out a natural
selection of those organisms which vary in the direction of fitter
adaptation to the conditions of their life. So much success attended his
application of the Selection-formula that for a time he regarded Natural
Selection as almost the sole factor in evolution, variations being
pre-supposed; gradually, however, he came to recognise that there was
some validity in the factors which had been emphasised by Lamarck

and by Buffon, and in his well known summing up in the sixth edition
of the Origin he says of the transformation of species: "This has been
effected chiefly through the natural selection of numerous successive,
slight, favourable variations;