unable to understand how anything can possibly go right unless he sees to it himself.  Nature works departmentally and by way of leaving details to subordinates.  But though those who see nature thus do indeed deny design of the prescient-from-all-eternity order, they in no way impugn a method which is far more in accord with all that we commonly think of as design.  A design which is as incredible as that a ewe should give birth to a lion becomes of a piece with all that we observe most frequently if it be regarded rather as an aggregation of many small steps than as a single large one.  This principle is very simple, but it seems rather difficult to understand.  It has taken several generations before people would admit it as regards organism even after it was pointed out to them, and those who saw it as regards organism still failed to understand it as regards design; an inexorable “Thus far shalt thou go and no farther” barred them from fruition of the harvest they should have been the first to reap.  The very men who most insisted that specific difference was the accumulation of differences so minute as to be often hardly, if at all, perceptible, could not see that the striking and baffling phenomena of design in connection with organism admitted of exactly the same solution as the riddle of organic development, and should be seen not as a result reached per saltum, but as an accumulation of small steps or leaps in a given direction.  It was as though those who had insisted on the derivation of all forms of the steam-engine from the common kettle, and who saw that this stands in much the same relations to the engines, we will say, of the Great Eastern steamship as the amoeba to man, were to declare that the Great Eastern engines were not designed at all, on the ground that no one in the early kettle days had foreseen so great a future development, and were unable to understand that a piecemeal solvitur ambulando design is more omnipresent, all-seeing, and all-searching, and hence more truly in the strictest sense design, than any speculative leap of fancy, however bold and even at times successful.

From Lamarck I went on to Buffon and Erasmus Darwin—­better men both of them than Lamarck, and treated by him much as he has himself been treated by those who have come after him—­and found that the system of these three writers, if considered rightly, and if the corollary that heredity is only a mode of memory were added, would get us out of our dilemma as regards descent and design, and enable us to keep both.  We could do this by making the design manifested in organism more like the only design of which we know anything, and therefore the only design of which we ought to speak—­I mean our own.