is, in relation to adaptive forms” should be omitted, as surplusage that draws the reader’s attention from the point at issue; the sentence really amounts to this—­that modification has been effected chiefly through selection in the ordinary course of nature from among spontaneous variations, aided in an unimportant manner by variations which QUa us are spontaneous.  Nevertheless, though these spontaneous variations are still so trifling in effect that they only aid spontaneous variations in an unimportant manner, in his earlier editions Mr. Darwin thought them still less important than he does now.

This comes of tinkering.  We do not know whether we are on our heads or our heels.  We catch ourselves repeating “important,” “unimportant,” “unimportant,” “important,” like the King when addressing the jury in “Alice in Wonderland;” and yet this is the book of which Mr. Grant Allen {163a} says that it is “one of the greatest, and most learned, the most lucid, the most logical, the most crushing, the most conclusive, that the world has ever seen.  Step by step, and principle by principle, it proved every point in its progress triumphantly before it went on to the next.  So vast an array of facts so thoroughly in hand had never before been mustered and marshalled in favour of any biological theory.”  The book and the eulogy are well mated.

I see that in the paragraph following on the one just quoted, Mr. Allen says, that “to the world at large Darwinism and evolution became at once synonymous terms.”  Certainly it was no fault of Mr. Darwin’s if they did not, but I will add more on this head presently; for the moment, returning to Mr. Darwin, it is hardly credible, but it is nevertheless true, that Mr Darwin begins the paragraph next following on the one on which I have just reflected so severely, with the words, “It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified.”  If Mr. Darwin found the large classes of facts “satisfactorily” explained by the survival of the luckiest irrespectively of the cunning which enabled them to turn their luck to account, he must have been easily satisfied.  Perhaps he was in the same frame of mind as when he said {164a} that “even an imperfect answer would be satisfactory,” but surely this is being thankful for small mercies.

On the following page Mr. Darwin says:- “Although I am fully” (why “fully"?) “convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume under the form of an abstract, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists,” &c.  I have not quoted the whole of Mr. Darwin’s sentence, but it implies that any experienced naturalist who remained unconvinced was an old-fashioned, prejudiced person.  I confess that this is what I rather feel about the