deny that these have produced some, and sometimes even an important, effect in modifying species, but he assigns by far the most important role in the whole scheme to natural selection, which, as I have already shown, must, with him, be regarded as a synonym for luck pure and simple.  This, for reasons well shown by Mr. Spencer in the articles under consideration, is so untenable that it seems only possible to account for its having been advanced at all by supposing Mr. Darwin’s judgment to have been perverted by some one or more of the many causes that might tend to warp them.  What the chief of those causes may have been I shall presently point out.

Buffon erred rather on the side of ignoring functionally produced modifications than of insisting on them.  The main agency with him is the direct action of the environment upon the organism.  This, no doubt, is a flaw in Buffon’s immortal work, but it is one which Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck easily corrected; nor can we doubt that Buffon would have readily accepted their amendment if it had been suggested to him.  Buffon did infinitely more in the way of discovering and establishing the theory of descent with modification than any one has ever done either before or since.  He was too much occupied with proving the fact of evolution at all, to dwell as fully as might have been wished upon the details of the process whereby the amoeba had become man, but we have already seen that he regarded inherited mutilation as the cause of establishing a new breed of dogs, and this is at any rate not laying much stress on functionally produced modifications.  Again, when writing of the dog, he speaks of variations arising “By some chance common enough with nature,” {104a} and clearly does not contemplate function as the sole cause of modification.  Practically, though I grant I should be less able to quote passages in support of my opinion than I quite like, I do not doubt that his position was much the same as that of his successors, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck.

Lamarck is more vulnerable than either Erasmus Darwin or Buffon on the score of unwillingness to assign its full share to mere chance, but I do not for a moment believe his comparative reticence to have been caused by failure to see that the chapter of accidents is a fateful one.  He saw that the cunning or functional side had been too much lost sight of, and therefore insisted on it, but he did not mean to say that there is no such thing as luck.  “Let us suppose,” he says, “that a grass growing in a low-lying meadow, gets carried by some accident to the brow of a neighbouring hill, where the soil is still damp enough for the plant to be able to exist.” {105a} Or again—­“With sufficient time, favourable conditions of life, successive changes in the condition of the globe, and the power of new surroundings and habits to modify the organs of living bodies, all animal and vegetable forms have