“Reflecting on these facts, and collecting analogous ones, it seemed to me probable that allied species were descended from a common ancestor.  But during several years I could not conceive how each form could have been modified so as to become admirably adapted to its place in nature.  I began, therefore, to study domesticated animals and cultivated plants, and after a time perceived that man’s power of selecting and breeding from certain individuals was the most powerful of all means in the production of new races.  Having attended to the habits of animals and their relations to the surrounding conditions, I was able to realise the severe struggle for existence to which all organisms are subjected, and my geological observations had allowed me to appreciate to a certain extent the duration of past geological periods.  Therefore, when I happened to read Malthus on population, the idea of natural selection flashed on me.  Of all minor points, the last which I appreciated was the importance and cause of the principle of divergence.”

This is all very naive, and accords perfectly with the introductory paragraphs of the “Origin of Species;” it gives us the same picture of a solitary thinker, a poor, lonely, friendless student of nature, who had never so much as heard of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, or Lamarck.  Unfortunately, however, we cannot forget the description of the influences which, according to Mr. Grant Allen, did in reality surround Mr. Darwin’s youth, and certainly they are more what we should have expected than those suggested rather than expressly stated by Mr. Darwin.  “Everywhere around him,” says Mr. Allen, {174a} “in his childhood and youth these great but formless” (why “formless"?) “evolutionary ideas were brewing and fermenting.  The scientific society of his elders and of the contemporaries among whom he grew up was permeated with the leaven of Laplace and Lamarck, of Hutton and of Herschel.  Inquiry was especially everywhere rife as to the origin and nature of specific distinctions among plants and animals.  Those who believed in the doctrine of Buffon and of the ‘Zoonomia,’ and those who disbelieved in it, alike, were profoundly interested and agitated in soul by the far-reaching implications of that fundamental problem.  On every side evolutionism, in its crude form.” (I suppose Mr. Allen could not help saying “in its crude form,” but descent with modification in 1809 meant, to all intents and purposes, and was understood to mean, what it means now, or ought to mean, to most people.) “The universal stir,” says Mr. Allen on the following page, “and deep prying into evolutionary questions which everywhere existed among scientific men in his early days was naturally communicated to a lad born of a scientific family and inheriting directly in blood and bone the biological tastes and tendencies of Erasmus Darwin.”