piece, kept brewing everywhere in the minds and brains of scientific
thinkers. The notions which to the outside public were startlingly new
when Darwin's book took the world by storm, were old indeed to the
thinkers and workers who had long been familiar with the principle of
descent with modification and the speculations of the Lichfield doctor
or the Paris philosopher. Long before Darwin wrote his great work,
Herbert Spencer had put forth in plain language every idea which the
drawing-room biologists attributed to Darwin. The supporters of the
development hypothesis, he said seven years earlier--yes, he called it
the 'development hypothesis' in so many words--'can show that
modification has effected and is effecting great changes in all
organisms, subject to modifying influences.' They can show, he goes on
(if I may venture to condense so great a thinker), that any existing
plant or animal, placed under new conditions, begins to undergo adaptive
changes of form and structure; that in successive generations these
changes continue, till the plant or animal acquires totally new habits;
that in cultivated plants and domesticated animals changes of the sort
habitually occur; that the differences thus caused, as for example in
dogs, are often greater than those on which species in the wild state
are founded, and that throughout all organic nature there _is_ at work a
modifying influence of the same sort as that which they believed to
have caused the differences of species--'an influence which, to all
appearance, would produce in the millions of years and under the great
variety of conditions which geological records imply, any amount of
change.' What is this but pure Darwinism, as the drawing-room
philosopher still understands the word? And yet it was written seven
years before Darwin published the 'Origin of Species.'

The fact is, one might draw up quite a long list of Darwinians before
Darwin. Here are a few of them--Buffon, Lamarck, Goethe, Oken, Bates,