I will say more on this head in a following chapter; in this present one my business should be confined to pointing out as clearly and succinctly as I can the issue between the two great main contending opinions concerning organic development that obtain among those who accept the theory of descent at all; nor do I believe that this can be done more effectually and accurately than by saying, as above, that Mr. Charles Darwin (whose name, by the way, was “Charles Robert,” and not, as would appear from the title-pages of his books, “Charles” only), Mr. A. R. Wallace, and their supporters are the apostles of luck, while Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, followed, more or less timidly, by the Geoffroys and by Mr. Herbert Spencer, and very timidly indeed by the Duke of Argyll, preach cunning as the most important means of organic modification.

Note.—­It appears from “Samuel Butler:  A Memoir” (II, 29) that Butler wrote to his father (Dec. 1885) about a passage in Horace (near the beginning of the First Epistle of the First Book) —

Nunc in Aristippi furtim praecepta relabor,
Et mihi res, non me rebus subjungere conor.

On the preceding page he is adapting the second of these two verses to his own purposes.—­H.  F. J.

CHAPTER VII—­(Intercalated) Mr. Spencer’s “The Factors of Organic Evolution”

Since the foregoing and several of the succeeding chapters were written, Mr. Herbert Spencer has made his position at once more clear and more widely understood by his articles “The Factors of Organic Evolution” which appeared in the Nineteenth Century for April and May, 1886.  The present appears the fittest place in which to intercalate remarks concerning them.

Mr. Spencer asks whether those are right who regard Mr. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection as by itself sufficient to account for organic evolution.

“On critically examining the evidence” (modern writers never examine evidence, they always “critically,” or “carefully,” or “patiently,” examine it), he writes, we shall find reason to think that it by no means explains all that has to be explained.  Omitting for the present any consideration of a factor which may be considered primordial, it may be contended that one of the factors alleged by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck must be recognised as a co-operator.  Unless that increase of a part resulting from extra activity, and that decrease of it resulting from inactivity, are transmissible to descendants, we are without a key to many phenomena of organic evolution.  Utterly inadequate to explain the Major part of the facts as is the hypothesis of the inheritance of functionally produced modifications, yet there is a minor part of the facts very extensive though less, which must be ascribed to this cause.”  (Italics mine.)