Excerpt from Natural Selection and Tropical Nature: Essays on Descriptive and Theoretical Biology The present volume consists mainly of a reprint of two volumes of essays - Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, which appeared in 1870, with a second edition in 1871, and has now been many years out of print; and, Tropical Nature and Other Essays, which appeared in 1878. In preparing a new edition of these works to appear as a single volume I have thought it advisable to omit two essays - that on "The Malayan Papilionidæ" as being too technical for general readers, and that on "The Distribution of Animals as indicating Geographical Changes," which contains nothing that is not more fully treated in my other works. Another essay - "By - Paths in the Domain of Biology" - has also been partly omitted, one portion of it forming a short chapter on "The Antiquity and Origin of Man," while another portion has been incorporated in the chapter on "The Colours of Animals and Sexual Selection." More than compensating for these omissions are two new chapters - "The Antiquity of Man in North America" and 'The Debt of Science to Darwin." Many corrections and some important additions have been made to the text, the chief of which are indicated in the table given below; and to facilitate reference the two original works have separate headings, and form Parts I. and II. of the present volume. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.