Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/840

818 hero credit for what he really was and what he really did; it does not consist in attributing to him the work actually done by others, while suppressing the very facts which form his chief claim to the gratitude and consideration of posterity. Now there is one invaluable piece of work which Darwin really did do, and do effectively—he discovered and proved to the hilt the theory of natural selection, as a cause, and probably the chief cause, both of the diversity of species and of their adaptation to the environment. And there are two important pieces of work which Darwin did not do, but with which he is generally credited—he did not originate the idea of descent with modification in plants and animals; and he did not originate the general idea of evolution, as a cosmical process. These last two ideas come to us from elsewhere. That of descent with modification we derive from Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, and others, following in the footsteps of still earlier vague guessers. That of evolution as a pervading cosmical process we derive from Herbert Spencer, and I venture to say from Herbert Spencer alone. Even the word is Mr. Spencer's; before his time, it was never used, I believe, in that particular sense; and after him, it was seldom employed by Darwin, who used it (when he used it at all) in reference to Mr. Spencer's general concepts. So, too, the phrases, "survival of the fittest," "adaptation to the environment," and others, due entirely to Mr. Spencer, are regarded as a rule by the averagely well-read man as purely "Darwinian." It seems to me, therefore, that to do justice to Mr. Spencer in this matter is also incidentally to do justice to Darwin. For in this place, Darwin, with his inflexible sense of equity, his perfect generosity, his admirable self-effacement, would have been the last man to put forward a claim to what belonged of right to others; and in the second place, with his cautious, experimental English mind, he would never have desired to have his name associated with many of Mr. Spencer's most brilliant and powerful a priori achievements.

Nevertheless, before the appearance of Mr. Clodd's book, there were, I believe, but two works extant which endeavored to put this question in its true light, and even there mainly as regarded the theory of natural selection. One of those two books was Mr. Samuel Butler's Evolution Old and New; the other, if I may venture to mention it, was my own small volume on Charles Darwin. But Mr. Butler, both in the work I have just named, and still more in Luck or Cunning, while doing full justice to the precursors and contemporaries of Darwin, has suffered himself to be carried away by a most singular preconception as to Charles Darwin himself, and has represented that most modest and self-effacing of savants as deliberately endeavoring to filch for himself the discoveries and achievements of biologists who went before