An English economist, born near Dorking, in Surrey; is famous as the author of an "Essay on the Principle of Population," of which the first edition appeared in 1798, and the final, greatly enlarged, in 1803; the publication provoked much hostile criticism, as it propounded a doctrine which was disastrous to the accepted theory of perfectibility, and which aimed at showing how the progress of the race was held in check by the limited supply of the means of subsistence, a doctrine that admittedly anticipated that struggle for life on a larger scale which the Darwinian hypothesis requires for its "survival of the fittest" (1766-1834).