Still, not to lag behind the rest of the
world, we read the book in which the new theory is promulgated. We
took it up, like our neighbors, and, as was natural, in a somewhat
captious frame of mind.
Well, we found no cause of quarrel with the first chapter. Here the
author takes us directly to the barn-yard and the kitchen-garden.
Like an honorable rural member of our General Court, who sat silent
until, near the close of a long session, a bill requiring all swine
at large to wear pokes was introduced, when he claimed the privilege
of addressing the house, on the proper ground that he had been
"brought up among the pigs, and knew all about them,"--so we were
brought up among cows and cabbages; and the lowing of cattle, the
cackling of hens, and the cooing of pigeons were sounds native and
pleasant to our ears. So "Variation under Domestication" dealt with
familiar subjects in a natural way, and gently introduced "Variation
under Nature," which seemed likely enough. Then follows "Struggle for
Existence,"--a principle which we experimentally know to be true and
cogent,--bringing the comfortable assurance, that man, even upon
Leviathan Hobbes's theory of society, is no worse than the rest of
creation, since all Nature is at war, one species with another, and
the nearer kindred the more internecine,--bringing in thousand-fold
confirmation and extension of the Malthusian doctrine, that
population tends far to outrun means of subsistence throughout the
animal and vegetable world, and has to be kept down by sharp
preventive checks; so that not more than one of a hundred or a
thousand of the individuals whose existence is so wonderfully and so
sedulously provided for ever comes to anything, under ordinary
circumstances; so the lucky and the strong must prevail, and the
weaker and ill-favored must perish;--and then follows, as naturally
as one sheep follows another, the chapter on "Natural Selection,"
Darwin's _cheval de bataille_, which is very much the Napoleonic
doctrine, that Providence favors the strongest battalions,--that,
since many more individuals are born than can possibly survive, those
individuals and those variations which possess any advantage, however
slight, over the rest, are in the long run sure to survive, to
propagate, and to occupy the limited field, to the exclusion or
destruction of the weaker brethren.
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