Mr. Darwin has a habit, borrowed, perhaps, mutatis mutandis, from the framers of our collects, of every now and then adding the words “through natural selection,” as though this squared everything, and descent with modification thus became his theory at once.  This is not the case.  Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck believed in natural selection to the full as much as any follower of Mr. Charles Darwin can do.  They did not use the actual words, but the idea underlying them is the essence of their system.  Mr. Patrick Matthew epitomised their doctrine more tersely, perhaps, than was done by any other of the pre-Charles-Darwinian evolutionists, in the following passage which appeared in 1831, and which I have already quoted in “Evolution Old and New” (pp. 320, 323).  The passage runs:-

“The self-regulating adaptive disposition of organised life may, in part, be traced to the extreme fecundity of nature, who, as before stated, has in all the varieties of her offspring a prolific power much beyond (in many cases a thousandfold) what is necessary to fill up the vacancies caused by senile decay.  As the field of existence is limited and preoccupied, it is only the hardier, more robust, better suited to circumstance individuals, who are able to struggle forward to maturity, these inhabiting only the situations to which they have superior adaptation and greater power of occupancy than any other kind; the weaker and less circumstance-suited being prematurely destroyed.  This principle is in constant action; it regulates the colour, the figure, the capacities, and instincts; those individuals in each species whose colour and covering are best suited to concealment or protection from enemies, or defence from inclemencies or vicissitudes of climate, whose figure is best accommodated to health, strength, defence, and support; whose capacities and instincts can best regulate the physical energies to self-advantage according to circumstances—­in such immense waste of primary and youthful life those only come forward to maturity from the strict ordeal by which nature tests their adaptation to her Standard of Perfection and fitness to continue their kind by reproduction.” {86a} A little lower down Mr. Matthew speaks of animals under domestication “Not having undergone selection by the law of nature, of which we have spoken, and hence being unable to maintain their ground without culture and protection.”