And yet it is pleasant to reflect that his triumph was not, as triumphs go, long lived.  How is Cuvier best known now?  As one who missed a great opportunity; as one who was great in small things, and stubbornly small in great ones.  Lamarck died in 1831; in 1861 descent with modification was almost universally accepted by those most competent to form an opinion.  This result was by no means so exclusively due to Mr. Darwin’s “Origin of Species” as is commonly believed.  During the thirty years that followed 1831 Lamarck’s opinions made more way than Darwinians are willing to allow.  Granted that in 1861 the theory was generally accepted under the name of Darwin, not under that of Lamarck, still it was Lamarck and not Darwin that was being accepted; it was descent, not descent with modification by means of natural selection from among fortuitous variations, that we carried away with us from the “Origin of Species.”  The thing triumphed whether the name was lost or not.  I need not waste the reader’s time by showing further how little weight he need attach to the fact that Lamarckism was not immediately received with open arms by an admiring public.  The theory of descent has become accepted as rapidly, if I am not mistaken, as the Copernican theory, or as Newton’s theory of gravitation.

When Professor Ray Lankester goes on to speak of the “undemonstrable agencies” “arbitrarily asserted” to exist by Professor Semper, he is again presuming on the ignorance of his readers.  Professor Semper’s agencies are in no way more undemonstrable than Mr. Darwin’s are.  Mr. Darwin was perfectly cogent as long as he stuck to Lamarck’s demonstration; his arguments were sound as long as they were Lamarck’s, or developments of, and riders upon, Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, and almost incredibly silly when they were his own.  Fortunately the greater part of the “Origin of Species” is devoted to proving the theory of descent with modification, by arguments against which no exception would have been taken by Mr. Darwin’s three great precursors, except in so far as the variations whose accumulation results in specific difference are supposed to be fortuitous—­and, to do Mr. Darwin justice, the fortuitousness, though always within hail, is kept as far as possible in the background.

“Mr. Darwin’s arguments,” says Professor Ray Lankester, “rest on the proved existence of minute, many-sided, irrelative variations not produced by directly transforming agents.”  Mr. Darwin throughout the body of the “Origin of Species” is not supposed to know what his variations are or are not produced by; if they come, they come, and if they do not come, they do not come.  True, we have seen that in the last paragraph of the book all this was changed, and the variations were ascribed to the conditions of existence, and to use and disuse, but a concluding paragraph cannot be allowed to override a whole book throughout which the variations have been kept to hand as accidental.