CHAPTER XIX.

THE DIFFICULTY WITH WHICH THE “ORIGIN” WAS UNDERSTOOD.

Even earlier than Huxley, H. C. Watson wrote warmly accepting natural selection. In his letter, which is dated November 21st, 1859, he said:--

“Your leading idea will surely become recognised as an established truth in science--_i.e._ ‘Natural Selection.’ It has the characteristics of all great natural truths, clarifying what was obscure, simplifying what was intricate, adding greatly to previous knowledge. You are the greatest revolutionist in natural history of this century, if not of all centuries.”

[Sidenote: MISUNDERSTANDING OF THE THEORY.]

For some years to come, however, such views as these were the exception, as will soon be shown.

The Duke of Argyll has argued (_Nineteenth Century_, December, 1887) that the success of “Natural Selection” has followed from the convincing character of the words used, scientific men (“the populace of science” he calls them) being so easily led by the power of loose analogies that they have been convinced of the truth of the principle because they are familiar with Nature on the one hand, and selection as a process on the other!

As I am not aware that this preposterous suggestion has ever been publicly disproved, and since therefore some readers of the journal in question may have been misled by it, I have collected much evidence, which proves that the principle of natural selection was only absorbed with the very greatest difficulty, and that the words used in describing it for a long time entirely failed to inform even eminent scientific men of the essential characteristics of the theory itself, and certainly failed most signally to convince them. Conviction came very gradually as the theory was slowly understood and was seen to offer an intelligible explanation of an immense and ever-increasing number of facts.

I will now bring together quotations from Darwin’s letters in 1859 and 1860, showing how soon he came to realise the difficulty with which natural selection was understood, and to feel that he might have been more successful with some other title.

In 1859 he wrote to Dr. W. B. Carpenter--“I have found the most extraordinary difficulty in making even able men understand at what I was driving.” The remaining quotations are all taken from letters written in 1860. By the middle of this year, when he was feeling oppressed by hostile reviews and unfair and ignorant criticisms (“I am getting wearied at the storm of hostile reviews, and hardly any useful”), he often alludes to the failure of opponents to understand his theory. Thus, in a letter to Hooker (June 5th), he says:--

“This review, however, and Harvey’s letter have convinced me that I must be a very bad explainer. Neither really understand what I mean by Natural Selection.... I hope to God you will be more successful than I have been in making people understand your meaning.”

He says almost the same thing in a letter to Lyell (June 6th):--

“... I am beginning to despair of ever making the majority understand my notions.... I must be a very bad explainer. I hope to Heaven that you will succeed better. Several reviews and several letters have shown me too clearly how little I am understood. I suppose ‘Natural Selection’ was a bad term; ... I can only hope by reiterated explanations finally to make the matter clearer.”

Writing to Asa Gray, he says:--

“... I have had a letter of fourteen folio pages from Harvey against my book, with some ingenious and new remarks; but it is an extraordinary fact that he does not understand at all what I mean by Natural Selection.”

Later on, he again wrote to Lyell:--

“Talking of ‘natural selection’; if I had to commence _de novo_, I would have used ‘natural preservation.’ For I find men like Harvey of Dublin cannot understand me, though he has read the book twice. Dr. Gray of the British Museum remarked to me that, ‘_selection_ was obviously impossible with plants! No one could tell him how it could be possible!’ And he may now add that the author did not attempt it to him!”

And still later he wrote asking Lyell’s advice as to additions to a new edition of the “Origin,” saying:--“I would also put a note to ‘Natural Selection,’ and show how variously it has been misunderstood.” This note is to be found on page 63 of the sixth edition. In it he tells us that some writers have “even imagined that natural selection induces variability,” instead of merely preserving it; others that natural selection “implies conscious choice in the animals which become modified”; others that it is set up “as an active power or Deity.” In writing (December) to Murray about a new edition of the “Origin,” he alludes to the “many corrections, or rather additions, which I have made in hopes of making my many rather stupid reviewers at least understand what is meant.”

He seems to have retained a very vivid recollection of the difficulty with which his theory was understood at first; thus he tells us in his “Autobiography”:--

“I tried once or twice to explain to able men what I meant by Natural Selection, but signally failed.”

Why the term “natural selection” was chosen by Darwin is very clearly shown in the three following quotations from letters to distinguished scientific men, which were probably written in answer to attacks or criticisms on this very point.

He writes to Lyell in 1859, “Why I like the term is that it is constantly used in all works on breeding.”

Writing to H. G. Bronn in 1860, he explains his motives with great clearness and force:--

“Several scientific men have thought the term ‘Natural Selection’ good, because its meaning is _not_ obvious, and each man could not put on it his own interpretation, and because it at once connects variation under domestication and nature.... Man has altered, and thus improved the English race-horse by _selecting_ successive fleeter individuals; and I believe, owing to the struggle for existence, that similar _slight_ variations in a wild horse, _if advantageous to it_, would be _selected_ or _preserved_ by nature; hence Natural Selection.”

In 1866 he wrote to Wallace, comparing the term with that which we owe to Herbert Spencer:--

“I fully agree with all that you say on the advantages of H. Spencer’s excellent expression of ‘the survival of the fittest.’ This however had not occurred to me till reading your letter. It is, however, a great objection to this term that it cannot be used as a substantive governing a verb; and that it is a real objection I infer from H. Spencer continually using the words, natural selection. I formerly thought, probably in an exaggerated degree, that it was a great advantage to bring into connection natural and artificial selection; this indeed led me to use a term in common, and I still think it some advantage.... The term Natural Selection has now been so largely used abroad and at home, that I doubt whether it could be given up, and with all its faults I should be sorry to see the attempt made. Whether it will be rejected must now depend ‘on the survival of the fittest.’ As in time the term must grow intelligible the objections to its use will grow weaker and weaker. I doubt whether the use of any term would have made the subject intelligible to some minds, clear as it is to others; for do we not see even to the present day Malthus on Population absurdly misunderstood? This reflection about Malthus has often comforted me when I have been vexed at the mis-statement of my own views.”

A large number of critics not only failed to understand natural selection, but they asserted that it was precisely the same theory as that advanced by Lamarck or one of the other writers on evolution before Darwin. This seems almost incredible to us at the present day, when the biological world is divided into two sections on the very subject, and when it is generally recognised that Lamarck’s theory would be, if it were proved to be sound, a formidable rival to natural selection as a motive cause of evolution. But the following quotations--a few among many--leave no doubt whatever upon the subject.

Evidence on this point reached Darwin almost immediately after the appearance of the “Origin.” Thus he writes to Hooker on December 14th, 1859:--

“Old J. E. Gray, at the British Museum, attacked me in fine style: ‘You have just reproduced Lamarck’s doctrine, and nothing else, and here Lyell and others have been attacking him for twenty years, and because _you_ ... say the very same thing, they are all coming round; it is the most ridiculous inconsistency,’ &c. &c.”

In the following year, Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, writing in the _Quarterly Review_ for July, 1860, appeals to Lyell,

“in order that with his help this flimsy speculation may be as completely put down as was what in spite of all denials we must venture to call its twin though less-instructed brother, the ‘Vestiges of Creation.’”

Again, Dr. Bree, in “Species not Transmutable,” says:

“The only real difference between Mr. Darwin and his two predecessors, [Lamarck and the “Vestiges”] is this:--that while the latter have each given a mode by which they conceive the great changes they believe in have been brought about, Mr. Darwin does no such thing.”

One of the most interesting of the countless examples of misunderstanding is contained in a recently published letter from W. S. Macleay to Robert Lowe.[H] This letter was written from Elizabeth Bay, and is dated May, 1860, evidently just after the first edition of the “Origin,” a copy of which had been sent by Robert Lowe, had been read by Macleay.

“Again if this primordial cell had a Creator, as Darwin seems to admit, I do not see what we gain by denying the Creator, as Darwin does, all management of it after its creation. Lamarck was more logical in supposing it to have existed of itself from all eternity--indeed this is the principal difference that I see between this theory of Darwin’s and that of Lamarck, who propounded everything essential in the former theory, in a work now rather rare--his ‘Philosophie Zoologique.’ But you may see an abridgment of it in so common a book as his ‘Histoire Nat. des Animaux Vertébrés,’ vol. i., pp. 188, _et seq._--Edit. 1818, where the examples given of natural selection are the gasteropod molluscs.... Natural selection (sometimes called ‘struggles’ by Darwin) is identical with the ‘Besoins des Choses’ of Lamarck, who, by means of his hypothesis, for instance, assigns the constant stretching of the neck to reach the acacia leaves as the cause of the extreme length of it in the giraffe; much in the same way the black bear, according to Darwin, became a whale, which I believe as little as his other assertion that our progenitors anciently had gills--only they had dropped off by want of use in the course of myriads of generations.”

I had long been anxious to possess a copy of the first edition of the “Origin,” and was fortunate enough to come across one about the time when Macleay’s letter was pointed out to me by my wife. I opened the title-page, and found upon it the signature “W. S. Macleay”; it must have been the very volume given him by Robert Lowe, which Macleay had read and believed he had been fairly criticising. Out of Macleay’s volume, therefore, I quote the sentences he referred to in his letter.

Darwin’s real statement about the black bear which “became a whale” is to be found on page 184:--

“In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.”

The statement about the gills which “dropped off by want of use” becomes in the original (p. 191):--

“In the higher vertebrata the branchiæ have wholly disappeared--the slits on the sides of the neck and the loop-like course of the arteries still marking in the embryo their former position.”

Although the hypothetical case of the black bear--carefully guarded as it is--does not now appear to us at all extravagant (indeed, in the cleft cheeks of the goat-sucker we have a precisely analogous case), Darwin seems to have thought it unsuitable, probably because it became an easy butt for ignorant ridicule. We find accordingly that in the second and all subsequent editions everything after the word “water” is omitted, while “almost” is inserted before “like a whale.” He was alluding to this passage when he wrote to Lyell (December 22nd, 1859): “Thanks about ‘Bears,’ a word of ill-omen to me.” Furthermore, Andrew Murray[I] says, concerning the sentences as they stand in the first edition:--

“In quoting this, I do not at all mean to give it as a fair illustration of Mr. Darwin’s views. I only refer to it as indicating the extent to which he is prepared to go. The example here given I look upon (as I have reason to know that Mr. Darwin himself does) merely as an extreme and somewhat extravagant illustration, imagined expressly to show in a forcible way how ‘natural selection’ would operate in making a mouth bigger and bigger, because more advantageous.”