twelve years before. "I thought of his clear exposition of 'the positive
checks to increase'--disease, accidents, war, and famine--which keep down
the population of savage races to so much lower an average than that of
more civilized peoples. It then occurred to me that these causes or their
equivalents are continually acting in the case of animals also; and as
animals usually breed much more rapidly than does mankind, the destruction
every year from these causes must be enormous in order to keep down the
numbers of each species, since they evidently do not increase regularly
from year to year, as otherwise the world would long ago have been densely
crowded with those that breed most quickly. Vaguely thinking over the
enormous and constant destruction which this implied, it occurred to me to
ask the question, Why do some die and some live? And the answer was
clearly, that on the whole the best fitted live. From the effects of
disease the most healthy escaped; from enemies the strongest, the swiftest,
or the most cunning; from famine the best hunters or those with the best
digestion; and so on. Then it suddenly flashed upon me that this self-
acting process would necessarily IMPROVE THE RACE, because in every
generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior
would remain--that is, THE FITTEST WOULD SURVIVE." (Ibid. Vol. 1. page
361.) We need not apologise for this long quotation, it is a tribute to
Darwin's magnanimous colleague, the Nestor of the evolutionist camp,--and
it probably indicates the line of thought which Darwin himself followed.
It is interesting also to recall the fact that in 1852, when Herbert
Spencer wrote his famous "Leader" article on "The Development Hypothesis"
in which he argued powerfully for the thesis that the whole animate world
is the result of an age-long process of natural transformation, he wrote
for "The Westminster Review" another important essay, "A Theory of
Population deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility", towards the
close of which he came within an ace of recognising that the struggle for
existence was a factor in organic evolution. At a time when pressure of