COLLECTION OF NOTES.
We see indications in the extracts from his note-book at this period (viz. between July, 1837, and February, 1838), and before he had arrived at the conception of Natural Selection, that he had the idea of “laws of change” affecting species to some extent like the laws of change which compel the individuals of every species to work out their own development, the extinction of the one corresponding in a measure to the death of the other. Thus he says, “It is a wonderful fact, horse, elephant, and mastodon dying out about the same time in such different quarters. Will Mr. Lyell say that some [same?] circumstance killed it over a tract from Spain to South America? Never.” We know that a few months later he would have himself accepted the view he imputes to Lyell, and would have regarded the extinction as due to some circumstance affecting the competition for food or some other relationship with the organic life of the same district. It is probable that the above quotation from his Diary was written in connection with the conclusion of Chapter IX. of the first edition of the “Journal of the Voyage” (pp. 211, 212); for the latter is a fuller exposition of the same argument.[B]
“One is tempted to believe,” he says, “in such simple relations, as variation of climate and food, or introduction of enemies, or the increased numbers of other species, as the cause of the succession of races. But it may be asked whether it is probable that [“than” is an evident misprint in the original] any such cause should have been in action during the same epoch over the whole northern hemisphere, so as to destroy the Elephas primigenius on the shores of Spain, on the plains of Siberia, and in Northern America.... These cases of extinction forcibly recall the idea (I do not wish to draw any close analogy) of certain fruit-trees, which, it has been asserted, though grafted on young stems, planted in varied situations, and fertilized by the richest manures, yet at one period have all withered away and perished. A fixed and determined length of life has in such cases been given to thousands and thousands of buds (or individual germs), although produced in long succession.”
He then concludes that the animals of one species, although “each individual appears nearly independent of its kind,” may be bound together by common laws. He ends by arguing that the adaptations of animals confined to certain areas cannot be related to the peculiarities of climate or country, because other animals introduced by man are often so much more successful than the aborigines. As to the causes of extinction, “all that at present can be said with certainty is that, as with the individual, so with the species, the hour of life has run its course, and is spent.”
EARLY VIEWS.
At this time he had the conception—as we see in the succeeding extracts from his Diary—of species being so constituted that they must give rise to other species; or, if not, that they must die out, just as an individual dies unrepresented if it has no offspring; that change—and evidently change in some fixed direction—or extinction, is inevitable in the history of a species after a certain period of time. With this view, which presented much resemblance to that of the author of the “Vestiges,” and which seemed uppermost in his mind at this time, there are traces of others. Thus in one extract the “wish of parents” was thought of as a very doubtful explanation of adaptation, while in another we meet a tolerably clear indication of natural selection, a variety which is not well adapted being doomed to extinction, while a favourable one is perpetuated, the death of a species being regarded as “a consequence ... of non-adaptation of circumstances.”
It seems certain that for fifteen months after July, 1837, he was keenly considering the various causes of evolution which were suggested to him by the facts of nature, and that some general idea of natural selection presented itself to him at times, although without any of the force and importance it assumed in his mind at a later time.
In October, 1838, he read “Malthus on Population,” and as he says:—
“Being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here then I had a theory by which to work.”
SKETCH OF THE “ORIGIN.”