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.  All this we pondered, and could not much object to.  In fact, we began to contract a liking for a system which at the outset illustrates the advantages of good breeding, and which makes the most “of every creature’s best.”

Could we “let by-gones be by-gones,” and, beginning now, go on improving and diversifying for the future by natural selection,—­could we even take up the theory at the introduction of the actually existing species, we should be well content, and so perhaps would most naturalists be.  It is by no means difficult to believe that varieties are incipient or possible species, when we see what trouble naturalists, especially botanists, have to distinguish between them,—­one regarding as a true species what another regards as a variety; when the progress of knowledge increases, rather than diminishes, the number of doubtful instances; and when