We all admit the value of Mr. Darwin’s work as having led to the general acceptance of evolution.  No one who remembers average middle-class opinion on this subject before 1860 will deny that it was Mr. Darwin who brought us all round to descent with modification; but Mr. Allen cannot rightly say that evolution had only existed before Mr. Darwin’s time in “a shadowy, undeveloped state,” or as “a mere plausible and happy guess.”  It existed in the same form as that in which most people accept it now, and had been carried to its extreme development, before Mr. Darwin’s father had been born.  It is idle to talk of Buffon’s work as “a mere plausible and happy guess,” or to imply that the first volume of the “Philosophie Zoologique” of Lamarck was a less full and sufficient demonstration of descent with modification than the “Origin of Species” is.  It has its defects, shortcomings, and mistakes, but it is an incomparably sounder work than the “Origin of Species;” and though it contains the deplorable omission of any reference to Buffon, Lamarck does not first grossly misrepresent Buffon, and then tell him to go away, as Mr. Darwin did to the author of the “Vestiges” and to Lamarck.  If Mr. Darwin was believed and honoured for saying much the same as Lamarck had said, it was because Lamarck had borne the brunt of the laughing.  The “Origin of Species” was possible because the “Vestiges” had prepared the way for it.  The “Vestiges” were made possible by Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin, and these two were made possible by Buffon.  Here a somewhat sharper line can be drawn than is usually found possible when defining the ground covered by philosophers.  No one broke the ground for Buffon to anything like the extent that he broke it for those who followed him, and these broke it for one another.

Mr. Allen says (p. 11) that, “in Charles Darwin’s own words, Lamarck ’first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change in the organic as well as in the inorganic world being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition.’” Mr. Darwin did indeed use these words, but Mr. Allen omits the pertinent fact that he did not use them till six thousand copies of his work had been issued, and an impression been made as to its scope and claims which the event has shown to be not easily effaced; nor does he say that Mr. Darwin only pays these few words of tribute in a quasi-preface, which, though prefixed to his later editions of the “Origin of Species,” is amply neutralised by the spirit which I have shown to be omnipresent in the body of the work itself.  Moreover, Mr. Darwin’s statement is inaccurate to an unpardonable extent; his words would be fairly accurate if applied to Buffon, but they do not apply to Lamarck.