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Hints of the idea of Natural Selection have been detected elsewhere. James Watt,[32] for instance, has been reported as one of the anticipators (1851). But we need not prolong the inquiry further, since Darwin did not know of any anticipations until after he had published the immortal work of 1859, and since none of those who got hold of the idea made any use of it. What Darwin did was to follow the clue which Malthus gave him, to realise, first by genius and afterwards by patience, how the complex and subtle struggle for existence works out a natural selection of those organisms which vary in the direction of fitter adaptation to the conditions of their life. So much success attended his application of the Selection-formula that for a time he regarded Natural Selection as almost the sole factor in evolution, variations being pre-supposed; gradually, however, he came to recognise that there was some validity in the factors which had been emphasised by Lamarck and by Buffon, and in his well known summing up in the sixth edition of the _Origin_ he says of the transformation of species: "This has been effected chiefly through the natural selection of numerous successive, slight, favourable variations; aided in an important manner by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts; and in an unimportant manner, that is, in relation to adaptive structures, whether past or present, by the direct action of external conditions, and by variations which seem to us in our ignorance to arise spontaneously."

It would seem that one who could so soften the heart and manners of Philip II. as did Queen Isabella, must have had a charm of person and character that no ordinary mortal could resist. One is compelled to a kindly feeling for this much-hated man, who daily visited the Queen when she was suffering from smallpox. In her many illnesses he was tenderly devoted to her, and when we remember the miseries of royal ladies whose children are girls, we almost love Philip for comforting Isabella when her first baby was not a son. Philip declared himself better pleased that she had given him a daughter, and made the declaration good by devotion to this child so long as he lived.

Almost never do we find a device in nature which occurs once only. The unique hardly exists: nature is a great copyist. At least two animals of wholly unlike kinds are all but sure to hit independently upon the self-same mechanism. So it is not surprising to learn that a cat-fish has invented an exactly similar mode of carrying its young to that adopted by the Surinam toad: only, here it is on the under surface, not the upper one, that the spawn is plastered. The eggs of this cat-fish, whose scientific name is Aspredo, are pressed into the skin below the body, and so borne about by the mother till they hatch. This is the second instance of which I spoke above, where the female fish herself assumes the care of her offspring, instead of leaving it entirely to her excellent partner.

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