Then why should he not have said so?  What object could he have in writing an elaborate work to support a theory which he knew all the time to be untenable?  The impropriety of such a course, unless the work was, like Buffon’s, transparently ironical, could only be matched by its fatuousness, or indeed by the folly of one who should assign action so motiveless to any one out of a lunatic asylum.

This sounds well, but unfortunately we cannot forget that when Mr. Darwin wrote the “Origin of Species” he claimed to be the originator of the theory of descent with modification generally; that he did this without one word of reference either to Buffon or Erasmus Darwin until the first six thousand copies of his book had been sold, and then with as meagre, inadequate notice as can be well conceived.  Lamarck was just named in the first editions of the “Origin of Species,” but only to be told that Mr. Darwin had not got anything to give him, and he must go away; the author of the “Vestiges of Creation” was also just mentioned, but only in a sentence full of such gross misrepresentation that Mr. Darwin did not venture to stand by it, and expunged it in later editions, as usual, without calling attention to what he had done.  It would have been in the highest degree imprudent, not to say impossible, for one so conscientious as Mr. Darwin to have taken the line he took in respect of descent with modification generally, if he were not provided with some ostensibly distinctive feature, in virtue of which, if people said anything, he might claim to have advanced something different, and widely different, from the theory of evolution propounded by his illustrious predecessors; a distinctive theory of some sort, therefore, had got to be looked for—­and if people look in this spirit they can generally find.

I imagine that Mr. Darwin, casting about for a substantial difference, and being unable to find one, committed the Gladstonian blunder of mistaking an unsubstantial for a substantial one.  It was doubtless because he suspected it that he never took us fully into his confidence, nor in all probability allowed even to himself how deeply he distrusted it.  Much, however, as he disliked the accumulation of accidental variations, he disliked not claiming the theory of descent with modification still more; and if he was to claim this, accidental his variations had got to be.  Accidental they accordingly were, but in as obscure and perfunctory a fashion as Mr. Darwin could make them consistently with their being to hand as accidental variations should later developments make this convenient.  Under these circumstances it was hardly to be expected that Mr. Darwin should help the reader to follow the workings of his mind—­nor, again, that a book the writer of which was hampered as I have supposed should prove clear and easy reading.