of Species.”  Subsequently to Mr. Chambers’ protest, and not till, as I have said, six thousand copies of the “Origin of Species” had been issued, the sentence complained of by Mr. Chambers was expunged, but without a word of retractation, and the passage which Mr. Allen thinks so generous was inserted into the “brief but imperfect” sketch which Mr. Darwin prefixed—­after Mr. Chambers had been effectually snuffed out—­to all subsequent editions of his “Origin of Species.”  There is no excuse for Mr. Darwin’s not having said at least this much about the author of the “Vestiges” in his first edition; and on finding that he had misrepresented him in a passage which he did not venture to retain, he should not have expunged it quietly, but should have called attention to his mistake in the body of his book, and given every prominence in his power to the correction.

Let us now examine Mr. Allen’s record in the matter of natural selection.  For years he was one of the foremost apostles of Neo-Darwinism, and any who said a good word for Lamarck were told that this was the “kind of mystical nonsense” from which Mr. Allen “had hoped Mr. Darwin had for ever saved us.” {216b} Then in October 1883 came an article in “Mind,” from which it appeared as though Mr. Allen had abjured Mr. Darwin and all his works.

“There are only two conceivable ways,” he then wrote, “in which any increment of brain power can ever have arisen in any individual.  The one is the Darwinian way, by spontaneous variation, that is to say, by variation due to minute physical circumstances affecting the individual in the germ.  The other is the Spencerian way, by functional increment, that is to say, by the effect of increased use and constant exposure to varying circumstances during conscious life.”

Mr. Allen calls this the Spencerian view, and so it is in so far as that Mr. Spencer has adopted it.  Most people will call it Lamarckian.  This, however, is a detail.  Mr. Allen continues:-

“I venture to think that the first way, if we look it clearly in the face, will be seen to be practically unthinkable; and that we have no alternative, therefore, but to accept the second.”

I like our looking a “way” which is “practically unthinkable” “clearly in the face.”  I particularly like “practically unthinkable.”  I suppose we can think it in theory, but not in practice.  I like almost everything Mr. Allen says or does; it is not necessary to go far in search of his good things; dredge up any bit of mud from him at random and we are pretty sure to find an oyster with a pearl in it, if we look it clearly in the face; I mean, there is sure to be something which will be at any rate “almost” practically unthinkable.  But however this may be, when Mr. Allen wrote his article in “Mind” two years ago, he was in substantial agreement with myself about the value of natural selection as a means of modification—­by natural selection I mean, of course, the commonly known Charles-Darwinian natural selection from fortuitous variations; now, however, in 1885, he is all for this same natural selection again, and in the preface to his “Charles Darwin” writes (after a handsome acknowledgment of “Evolution Old and New”) that he “differs from” me “fundamentally in” my “estimate of the worth of Charles Darwin’s distinctive discovery of natural selection.”