Mr. Darwin immediately goes on:  “A ratio of existence so high as to lead to a struggle for life, and as a consequence to natural selection, entailing divergence of character and the extinction of less improved forms;” so that natural selection turns up after all.  Yes—­in the letters that compose it, but not in the spirit; not in the special sense up to this time attached to it in the “Origin of Species.”  The expression as used here is one with which Erasmus Darwin would have found little fault, for it means not as elsewhere in Mr. Darwin’s book and on his title-page the preservation of “favoured” or lucky varieties, but the preservation of varieties that have come to be varieties through the causes assigned in the preceding two or three lines of Mr. Darwin’s sentence; and these are mainly functional or Erasmus-Darwinian; for the indirect action of the conditions of life is mainly functional, and the direct action is admitted on all hands to be but small.

It now appears more plainly, as insisted upon on an earlier page, that there is not one natural selection and one survival of the fittest, but two, inasmuch as there are two classes of variations from which nature (supposing no exception taken to her personification) can select.  The bottles have the same labels, and they are of the same colour, but the one holds brandy, and the other toast and water.  Nature can, by a figure of speech, be said to select from variations that are mainly functional or from variations that are mainly accidental; in the first case she will eventually get an accumulation of variation, and widely different types will come into existence; in the second, the variations will not occur with sufficient steadiness for accumulation to be possible.  In the body of Mr. Darwin’s book the variations are supposed to be mainly due to accident, and function, though not denied all efficacy, is declared to be the greatly subordinate factor; natural selection, therefore, has been hitherto throughout tantamount to luck; in the peroration the position is reversed in toto; the selection is now made from variations into which luck has entered so little that it may be neglected, the greatly preponderating factor being function; here, then, natural selection is tantamount to cunning.  We are such slaves of words that, seeing the words “natural selection” employed--and forgetting that the results ensuing on natural selection will depend entirely on what it is that is selected from, so that the gist of the matter lies in this and not in the words “natural selection”—­it escaped us that a change of front had been made, and a conclusion entirely alien to the tenor of the whole book smuggled into the last paragraph as the one which it had been written to support; the book preached luck, the peroration cunning.