to their surroundings, or, in other words, through accumulation in the common course of nature of the more lucky variations that chance occasionally purveys.  Mr. Wallace’s words, then, in reality amount to this, that the objections now made to Darwin’s theory apply solely to Darwin’s theory, which is all very well as far as it goes, but might have been more easily apprehended if he had simply said, “There are several objections now made to Mr. Darwin’s theory.”

It must be remembered that the passage quoted above occurs on the first page of a preface dated March, 1889, when the writer had completed his task, and was most fully conversant with his subject.  Nevertheless, it seems indisputable either that he is still confusing evolution with Mr. Darwin’s theory, or that he does not know when his sentences have point and when they have none.

I should perhaps explain to some readers that Mr. Darwin did not modify the main theory put forward, first by Buffon, to whom it indisputably belongs, and adopted from him by Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, and many other writers in the latter half of the eighteenth century and the earlier years of the nineteenth.  The early evolutionists maintained that all existing forms of animal and vegetable life, including man, were derived in course of descent with modification from forms resembling the lowest now known.

Mr. Darwin went as far as this, and farther no one can go.  The point at issue between him and his predecessors involves neither the main fact of evolution, nor yet the geometrical ratio of increase, and the struggle for existence consequent thereon.  Messrs. Darwin and Wallace have each thrown invaluable light upon these last two points, but Buffon, as early as 1756, had made them the keystone of his system.  “The movement of nature,” he then wrote, “turns on two immovable pivots:  one, the illimitable fecundity which she has given to all species:  the other, the innumerable difficulties which reduce the results of that fecundity.”  Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck followed in the same sense.  They thus admit the survival of the fittest as fully as Mr. Darwin himself, though they do not make use of this particular expression.  The dispute turns not upon natural selection, which is common to all writers on evolution, but upon the nature and causes of the variations that are supposed to be selected from and thus accumulated.  Are these mainly attributable to the inherited effects of use and disuse, supplemented by occasional sports and happy accidents?  Or are they mainly due to sports and happy accidents, supplemented by occasional inherited effects of use and disuse?

The Lamarckian system has all along been maintained by Mr. Herbert Spencer, who, in his Principles of Biology, published in 1865, showed how impossible it was that accidental variations should accumulate at all.  I am not sure how far Mr. Spencer would consent to being called a Lamarckian pure and simple, nor yet how far it is strictly accurate to call him one; nevertheless, I can see no important difference in the main positions taken by him and by Lamarck.