matter. The book ought to have been entitled, "On Natural
Selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for
life, as the main means of the origin of species;" this should have
been the expanded title, and the short title should have been "On
Natural Selection." The title would not then have involved an
important difference between its working and its technical forms,
and it would have better fulfilled the object of a title, which is,
of course, to give, as far as may be, the essence of a book in a
nutshell. We learn on the authority of Mr. Darwin himself {83a}
that the "Origin of Species" was originally intended to bear the
title "Natural Selection;" nor is it easy to see why the change
should have been made if an accurate expression of the contents of
the book was the only thing which Mr. Darwin was considering. It is
curious that, writing the later chapters of "Life and Habit" in
great haste, I should have accidentally referred to the "Origin of
Species" as "Natural Selection;" it seems hard to believe that there
was no intention in my thus unconsciously reverting to Mr. Darwin's
own original title, but there certainly was none, and I did not then
know what the original title had been.

If we had scrutinised Mr. Darwin's title-page as closely as we
should certainly scrutinise anything written by Mr. Darwin now, we
should have seen that the title did not technically claim the theory
of descent; practically, however, it so turned out that we
unhesitatingly gave that theory to the author, being, as I have
said, carried away by the three large "Origins of Species" (which we
understood as much the same thing as descent with modification), and
finding, as I shall show in a later chapter, that descent was
ubiquitously claimed throughout the work, either expressly or by
implication, as Mr. Darwin's theory. It is not easy to see how any