This he certainly does, for on page 81 of the work itself he speaks of “the distinctive notion of natural selection” as having, “like all true and fruitful ideas, more than once flashed,” &c.  I have explained usque ad nauseam, and will henceforth explain no longer, that natural selection is no “distinctive notion” of Mr. Darwin’s.  Mr. Darwin’s “distinctive notion” is natural selection from among fortuitous variations.

Writing again (p. 89) of Mr. Spencer’s essay in the “Leader,” {218a} Mr. Allen says:-

“It contains, in a very philosophical and abstract form, the theory of ‘descent with modification’ without the distinctive Darwinian adjunct of ‘natural selection’ or survival of the fittest.  Yet it was just that lever dexterously applied, and carefully weighted with the whole weight of his endlessly accumulated inductive instances, that finally enabled our modern Archimedes to move the world.”

Again:-

“To account for adaptation, for the almost perfect fitness of every plant and every animal to its position in life, for the existence (in other words) of definitely correlated parts and organs, we must call in the aid of survival of the fittest.  Without that potent selective agent, our conception of the becoming of life is a mere chaos; order and organisation are utterly inexplicable save by the brilliant illuminating ray of the Darwinian principle” (p. 93).

And yet two years previously this same principle, after having been thinkable for many years, had become “unthinkable.”

Two years previously, writing of the Charles-Darwinian scheme of evolution, Mr. Allen had implied it as his opinion “that all brains are what they are in virtue of antecedent function.”  “The one creed,” he wrote—­referring to Mr Darwin’s—­“makes the man depend mainly upon the accidents of molecular physics in a colliding germ cell and sperm cell; the other makes him depend mainly on the doings and gains of his ancestors as modified and altered by himself.”

This second creed is pure Erasmus-Darwinism and Lamarck.

Again:-

“It seems to me easy to understand how survival of the fittest may result in progress starting from such functionally produced gains (italics mine), but impossible to understand how it could result in progress, if it had to start in mere accidental structural increments due to spontaneous variation alone.” {219a}

Which comes to saying that it is easy to understand the Lamarckian system of evolution, but not the Charles-Darwinian.  Mr. Allen concluded his article a few pages later on by saying

“The first hypothesis” (Mr. Darwin’s) “is one that throws no light upon any of the facts.  The second hypothesis” (which is unalloyed Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck) “is one that explains them all with transparent lucidity.”  Yet in his “Charles Darwin” Mr. Allen tells us that though Mr. Darwin “did not invent the development theory, he made it believable and comprehensible” (p. 4).