It now appears that there is not one natural selection, and one survival of the fittest only, but two natural selections, and two survivals of the fittest, the one of which may be objected to as an expression more fit for religious and general literature than for science, but may still be admitted as sound in intention, while the other, inasmuch as it supposes accident to be the main purveyor of variations, has no correspondence with the actual course of things; for if the variations are matters of chance or hazard unconnected with any principle of constant application, they will not occur steadily enough, throughout a sufficient number of successive generations, nor to a sufficient number of individuals for many generations together at the same time and place, to admit of the fixing and permanency of modification at all.  The one theory of natural selection, therefore, may, and indeed will, explain the facts that surround us, whereas the other will not.  Mr. Charles Darwin’s contribution to the theory of evolution was not, as is commonly supposed, “natural selection,” but the hypothesis that natural selection from variations that are in the main fortuitous could accumulate and result in specific and generic differences.

In the foregoing paragraph I have given the point of difference between Mr. Charles Darwin and his predecessors.  Why, I wonder, have neither he nor any of his exponents put this difference before us in such plain words that we should readily apprehend it?  Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck were understood by all who wished to understand them; why is it that the misunderstanding of Mr. Darwin’s “distinctive feature” should have been so long and obstinate?  Why is it that, no matter how much writers like Mr. Grant Allen and Professor Ray Lankester may say about “Mr. Darwin’s master-key,” nor how many more like hyperboles they brandish, they never put a succinct resume of Mr. Darwin’s theory side by side with a similar resume of his grandfather’s and Lamarck’s?  Neither Mr. Darwin himself, not any of those to whose advocacy his reputation is mainly due, have done this.  Professor Huxley is the man of all others who foisted Mr. Darwin most upon us, but in his famous lecture on the coming of age of the “Origin of Species” he did not explain to his hearers wherein the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution differed from the old; and why not?  Surely, because no sooner is this made clear than we perceive that the idea underlying the old evolutionists is more in accord with instinctive feelings that we have cherished too long to be able now to disregard them than the central idea which underlies the “Origin of Species.”

What should we think of one who maintained that the steam-engine and telescope were not developed mainly through design and effort (letting the indisputably existing element of luck go without saying), but to the fact that if any telescope or steam-engine “happened to be made ever such a little more conveniently for man’s purposes than another,” &c., &c.?