Chapter XII
Why Darwin’s Variations were Accidental

He did not, however, make his distinctive feature as distinct as he should have done.  Sometimes he said one thing, and sometimes the directly opposite.  Sometimes, for example, the conditions of existence “included natural selection” or the fact that the best adapted to their surroundings live longest and leave most offspring; [156a] sometimes “the principle of natural selection” “fully embraced” “the expression of conditions of existence.” [156b]  It would not be easy to find more unsatisfactory writing than this is, nor any more clearly indicating a mind ill at ease with itself.  Sometimes “ants work by inherited instincts and inherited tools;” [157a] sometimes, again, it is surprising that the case of ants working by inherited instincts has not been brought as a demonstrative argument “against the well-known doctrine of inherited habit, as advanced by Lamarck.” [157b]  Sometimes the winglessness of beetles inhabiting ocean islands is “mainly due to natural selection,” [157c] and though we might be tempted to ascribe the rudimentary condition of the wing to disuse, we are on no account to do so—though disuse was probably to some extent “combined with” natural selection; at other times “it is probable that disuse has been the main means of rendering the wings of beetles living on small exposed islands” rudimentary. [157d]  We may remark in passing that if disuse, as Mr. Darwin admits on this occasion, is the main agent in rendering an organ rudimentary, use should have been the main agent in rendering it the opposite of rudimentary—that is to say, in bringing about its development.  The ostensible raison d’être, however, of the “Origin of Species” is to maintain that this is not the case.

There is hardly an opinion on the subject of descent with modification which does not find support in some one passage or another of the “Origin of Species.”  If it were desired to show that there is no substantial difference between the doctrine of Erasmus Darwin and that of his grandson, it would be easy to make out a good case for this, in spite of Mr. Darwin’s calling his grandfather’s views “erroneous,” in the historical sketch prefixed to the later editions of the “Origin of Species.”  Passing over the passage already quoted on p. 62 of this book, in which Mr. Darwin declares “habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary”—a sentence, by the way, than which none can be either more unfalteringly Lamarckian or less tainted with the vices of Mr. Darwin’s later style—passing this over as having been written some twenty years before the “Origin of Species”—the last paragraph of the “Origin of Species” itself is purely Lamarckian and Erasmus-Darwinian.  It declares the laws in accordance with which organic forms assumed their present shape to be—“Growth with reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life and from use and disuse, &c.” [158a]  Wherein does this differ from the confession of faith made by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck?  Where are the accidental fortuitous, spontaneous variations now?  And if they are not found important enough to demand mention in this peroration and stretto, as it were, of the whole matter, in which special prominence should be given to the special feature of the work, where ought they to be made important?

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.

And there can be no doubt Mr. Darwin intended that the change of front should escape us; for it cannot be believed that he did not perfectly well know what he had done.  Mr. Darwin edited and re-edited with such minuteness of revision that it may be said no detail escaped him provided it was small enough; it is incredible that he should have allowed this paragraph to remain from first to last unchanged (except for the introduction of the words “by the Creator,” which are wanting in the first edition) if they did not convey the conception he most wished his readers to retain.  Even if in his first edition he had failed to see that he was abandoning in his last paragraph all that it had been his ostensible object most especially to support in the body of his book, he must have become aware of it long before he revised the “Origin of Species” for the last time; still he never altered it, and never put us on our guard.

It was not Mr. Darwin’s manner to put his reader on his guard; we might as well expect Mr. Gladstone to put us on our guard about the Irish land bills.  Caveat lector seems to have been his motto.  Mr. Spencer, in the articles already referred to, is at pains to show that Mr. Darwin’s opinions in later life underwent a change in the direction of laying greater stress on functionally produced modifications, and points out that in the sixth edition of the “Origin of Species” Mr. Darwin says, “I think there can be no doubt that use in our domestic animals has strengthened and enlarged certain parts, and disuse diminished them;” whereas in his first edition he said, “I think there can be little doubt” of this.  Mr. Spencer also quotes a passage from “The Descent of Man,” in which Mr. Darwin said that even in the first edition of the “Origin of Species” he had attributed great effect to function, as though in the later ones he had attributed still more; but if there was any considerable change of position, it should not have been left to be toilsomely collected by collation of editions, and comparison of passages far removed from one another in other books.  If his mind had undergone the modification supposed by Mr. Spencer, Mr. Darwin should have said so in a prominent passage of some later edition of the “Origin of Species.”  He should have said—“In my earlier editions I underrated, as now seems probable, the effects of use and disuse as purveyors of the slight successive modifications whose accumulation in the ordinary course of things results in specific difference, and I laid too much stress on the accumulation of merely accidental variations;” having said this, he should have summarised the reasons that had made him change his mind, and given a list of the most important cases in which he has seen fit to alter what he had originally written.  If Mr. Darwin had dealt thus with us we should have readily condoned all the mistakes he would have been at all likely to have made, for we should have known him as one who was trying to help us, tidy us up, keep us straight, and enable us to use our judgments to the best advantage.  The public will forgive many errors alike of taste and judgment, where it feels that a writer persistently desires this.

I can only remember a couple of sentences in the later editions of the “Origin of Species” in which Mr. Darwin directly admits a change of opinion as regards the main causes of organic modification.  How shuffling the first of these is I have already shown in “Life and Habit,” p. 260, and in “Evolution, Old and New,” p. 359; I need not, therefore, say more here, especially as there has been no rejoinder to what I then said.  Curiously enough the sentence does not bear out Mr. Spencer’s contention that Mr. Darwin in his later years leaned more decidedly towards functionally produced modifications, for it runs: [161a]—“In the earlier editions of this work I underrated, as now seems probable, the frequency and importance of modifications due,” not, as Mr. Spencer would have us believe, to use and disuse, but “to spontaneous variability,” by which can only be intended, “to variations in no way connected with use and disuse,” as not being assignable to any known cause of general application, and referable as far as we are concerned to accident only; so that he gives the natural survival of the luckiest, which is indeed his distinctive feature, if it deserve to be called a feature at all, greater prominence than ever.  Nevertheless there is no change in his concluding paragraph, which still remains an embodiment of the views of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck.

The other passage is on p. 421 of the edition of 1876.  It stands:—“I have now recapitulated the facts and considerations which have thoroughly” (why “thoroughly”?) “convinced me that species have been modified during a long course of descent.  This has been effected chiefly through the natural selection of numerous, successive, slight, favourable variations; aided in an important manner by the inherited effects of the use and disuse of parts; and in an unimportant manner, that is, in relation to adaptive structures, whether past or present, by the direct action of external conditions, and by variations which seem to us in our ignorance to arise spontaneously.  It appears that I formerly underrated the frequency and value of these latter forms of variation as leading to permanent modifications of structure independently of natural selection.”

Here, again, it is not use and disuse which Mr. Darwin declares himself to have undervalued, but spontaneous variations.  The sentence just given is one of the most confusing I ever read even in the works of Mr Darwin.  It is the essence of his theory that the “numerous successive, slight, favourable variations,” above referred to, should be fortuitous, accidental, spontaneous; it is evident, moreover, that they are intended in this passage to be accidental or spontaneous, although neither of these words is employed, inasmuch as use and disuse and the action of the conditions of existence, whether direct or indirect, are mentioned specially as separate causes which purvey only the minor part of the variations from among which nature selects.  The words “that 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 quâ 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 experienced naturalists who differ in only too great numbers from myself, but I did not expect to find so much of the old Adam remaining in Mr. Darwin; I did not expect to find him support me in the belief that naturalists are made of much the same stuff as other people, and, if they are wise, will look upon new theories with distrust until they find them becoming generally accepted.  I am not sure that Mr. Darwin is not just a little bit flippant here.

Sometimes I ask myself whether it is possible that, not being convinced, I may be an experienced naturalist after all; at other times, when I read Mr. Darwin’s works and those of his eulogists, I wonder whether there is not some other Mr. Darwin, some other “Origin of Species,” some other Professors Huxley, Tyndal, and Ray Lankester, and whether in each case some malicious fiend has not palmed off a counterfeit upon me that differs toto cælo from the original.  I felt exactly the same when I read Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister”; I could not believe my eyes, which nevertheless told me that the dull diseased trash I was so toilsomely reading was a work which was commonly held to be one of the great literary masterpieces of the world.  It seemed to me that there must be some other Goethe and some other Wilhelm Meister.  Indeed I find myself so depressingly out of harmony with the prevailing not opinion only, but spirit—if, indeed, the Huxleys, Tyndals, Miss Buckleys, Ray Lankesters, and Romaneses express the prevailing spirit as accurately as they appear to do—that at times I find it difficult to believe I am not the victim of hallucination; nevertheless I know that either every canon, whether of criticism or honourable conduct, which I have learned to respect is an impudent swindle, suitable for the cloister only, and having no force or application in the outside world; or else that Mr. Darwin and his supporters are misleading the public to the full as much as the theologians of whom they speak at times so disapprovingly.  They sin, moreover, with incomparably less excuse.  Right as they doubtless are in much, and much as we doubtless owe them (so we owe much also to the theologians, and they also are right in much), they are giving way to a temper which cannot be indulged with impunity.  I know the great power of academicism; I know how instinctively academicism everywhere must range itself on Mr. Darwin’s side, and how askance it must look on those who write as I do; but I know also that there is a power before which even academicism must bow, and to this power I look not unhopefully for support.

As regards Mr. Spencer’s contention that Mr. Darwin leaned more towards function as he grew older, I do not doubt that at the end of his life Mr. Darwin believed modification to be mainly due to function, but the passage quoted on page 62 written in 1839, coupled with the concluding paragraph of the “Origin of Species” written in 1859, and allowed to stand during seventeen years of revision, though so much else was altered—these passages, when their dates and surroundings are considered, suggest strongly that Mr. Darwin thought during all the forty years or so thus covered exactly as his grandfather and Lamarck had done, and indeed as all sensible people since Buffon wrote have done if they have accepted evolution at all.

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.

The attitude of Mr. Darwin’s mind, whatever it may have been in regard to the theory of descent with modification generally, goes so far to explain his attitude in respect to the theory of natural selection (which, it cannot be too often repeated, is only one of the conditions of existence advanced as the main means of modification by the earlier evolutionists), that it is worth while to settle the question once for all whether Mr. Darwin did or did not believe himself justified in claiming the theory of descent as an original discovery of his own.  This will be a task of some little length, and may perhaps try the reader’s patience, as it assuredly tried mine; if, however, he will read the two following chapters, he will probably be able to make up his mind upon much that will otherwise, if he thinks about it at all, continue to puzzle him.

Chapter XIII
Darwin’s Claim to Descent with Modification

Mr. Allen, in his “Charles Darwin,” [168a] says that “in the public mind Mr. Darwin is commonly regarded as the discoverer and founder of the evolution hypothesis,” and on p. 177 he says that to most men Darwinism and evolution mean one and the same thing.  Mr. Allen declares misconception on this matter to be “so extremely general” as to be “almost universal;” this is more true than creditable to Mr. Darwin.

Mr. Allen says [168b] that though Mr. Darwin gained “far wider general acceptance” for both the doctrine of descent in general, and for that of the descent of man from a simious or semi-simious ancestor in particular, “he laid no sort of claim to originality or proprietorship in either theory.”  This is not the case.  No one can claim a theory more frequently and more effectually than Mr. Darwin claimed descent with modification, nor, as I have already said, is it likely that the misconception of which Mr. Allen complains would be general, if he had not so claimed it.  The “Origin of Species” begins:—

“When on board H.M.S. Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relation of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent.  These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species—that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.  On my return home it occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting upon all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it.  After five years’ work I allowed myself to speculate upon the subject, and drew up some short notes; these I enlarged in 1844 [169a] into a sketch of the conclusions which then seemed to me probable.  From that period to the present day I have steadily pursued the same object.  I hope I may be excused these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.”

This is bland, but peremptory.  Mr. Darwin implies that the mere asking of the question how species has come about opened up a field into which speculation itself had hardly yet ventured to intrude.  It was the mystery of mysteries; one of our greatest philosophers had said so; not one little feeble ray of light had ever yet been thrown upon it.  Mr. Darwin knew all this, and was appalled at the greatness of the task that lay before him; still, after he had pondered on what he had seen in South America, it really did occur to him, that if he was very very patient, and went on reflecting for years and years longer, upon all sorts of facts, good, bad, and indifferent, which could possibly have any bearing on the subject—and what fact might not possibly have some bearing?—well, something, as against the nothing that had been made out hitherto, might by some faint far-away possibility be one day dimly seem.  It was only what he had seen in South America that made all this occur to him.  He had never seen anything about descent with modification in any book, nor heard any one talk about it as having been put forward by other people; if he had, he would, of course, have been the first to say so; he was not as other philosophers are; so the mountain went on for years and years gestating, but still there was no labour.

“My work,” continues Mr. Darwin, “is now nearly finished; but as it will take me two or three years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish this abstract.  I have been more especially induced to do this, as Mr. Wallace, who is now studying the natural history of the Malay Archipelago, has arrived at almost exactly the same general conclusions that I have on the origin of species.”  Mr. Darwin was naturally anxious to forestall Mr. Wallace, and hurried up with his book.  What reader, on finding descent with modification to be its most prominent feature, could doubt—especially if new to the subject, as the greater number of Mr. Darwin’s readers in 1859 were—that this same descent with modification was the theory which Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace had jointly hit upon, and which Mr. Darwin was so anxious to show that he had not been hasty in adopting?  When Mr. Darwin went on to say that his abstract would be very imperfect, and that he could not give references and authorities for his several statements, we did not suppose that such an apology could be meant to cover silence concerning writers who during their whole lives, or nearly so, had borne the burden and heat of the day in respect of descent with modification in its most extended application.  “I much regret,” says Mr. Darwin, “that want of space prevents my having the satisfaction of acknowledging the generous assistance I have received from very many naturalists, some of them personally unknown to me.”  This is like what the Royal Academicians say when they do not intend to hang our pictures; they can, however, generally find space for a picture if they want to hang it, and we assume with safety that there are no master-works by painters of the very highest rank for which no space has been available.  Want of space will, indeed, prevent my quoting from more than one other paragraph of Mr. Darwin’s introduction; this paragraph, however, should alone suffice to show how inaccurate Mr. Allen is in saying that Mr. Darwin “laid no sort of claim to originality or proprietorship” in the theory of descent with modification, and this is the point with which we are immediately concerned.  Mr. Darwin says:—

“In considering the origin of species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings, on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution, geological succession, and other such facts, might come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but had descended like varieties from other species.”

It will be observed that not only is no hint given here that descent with modification was a theory which, though unknown to the general public, had been occupying the attention of biologists for a hundred years and more, but it is distinctly implied that this was not the case.  When Mr. Darwin said it was “conceivable that a naturalist might” arrive at the theory of descent, straightforward readers took him to mean that though this was conceivable, it had never, to Mr. Darwin’s knowledge, been done.  If we had a notion that we had already vaguely heard of the theory that men and the lower animals were descended from common ancestors, we must have been wrong; it was not this that we had heard of, but something else, which, though doubtless a little like it, was all wrong, whereas this was obviously going to be all right.

To follow the rest of the paragraph with the closeness that it merits would be a task at once so long and so unpleasant that I will omit further reference to any part of it except the last sentence.  That sentence runs:—

“In the case of the mistletoe, which draws its nourishment from certain trees, which has seeds that must be transported by certain birds, and which has flowers with separate sexes absolutely requiring the agency of certain insects to bring pollen from one flower to the other, it is equally preposterous to account for the structure of this parasite, with its relations to several distinct organic beings, by the effects of the external conditions, or of habit, or of the volition of the plant itself.”

Doubtless it would be preposterous to refer the structure of either woodpecker or mistletoe to the single agency of any one of these three causes; but neither Lamarck nor any other writer on evolution has, so far as I know, even contemplated this; the early evolutionists supposed organic modification to depend on the action and interaction of all three, and I venture to think that this will ere long be considered as, to say the least of it, not more preposterous than the assigning of the largely preponderating share in the production of such highly and variously correlated organisms as the mistletoe and woodpecker mainly to luck pure and simple, as is done by Mr. Charles Darwin’s theory.

It will be observed that in the paragraph last quoted from, Mr. Darwin, more suo, is careful not to commit himself.  All he has said is, that it would be preposterous to do something the preposterousness of which cannot be reasonably disputed; the impression, however, is none the less effectually conveyed, that some one of the three assigned agencies, taken singly, was the only cause of modification ever yet proposed, if, indeed, any writer had even gone so far as this.  We knew we did not know much about the matter ourselves, and that Mr. Darwin was a naturalist of long and high standing; we naturally, therefore, credited him with the same good faith as a writer that we knew in ourselves as readers; it never so much as crossed our minds to suppose that the head which he was holding up all dripping before our eyes as that of a fool, was not that of a fool who had actually lived and written, but only of a figure of straw which had been dipped in a bucket of red paint.  Naturally enough we concluded, since Mr. Darwin seemed to say so, that if his predecessors had nothing better to say for themselves than this, it would not be worth while to trouble about them further; especially as we did not know who they were, nor what they had written, and Mr. Darwin did not tell us.  It would be better and less trouble to take the goods with which it was plain Mr. Darwin was going to provide us, and ask no questions.  We have seen that even tolerably obvious conclusions were rather slow in occurring to poor simple-minded Mr. Darwin, and may be sure that it never once occurred to him that the British public would be likely to argue thus; he had no intention of playing the scientific confidence trick upon us.  I dare say not, but unfortunately the result has closely resembled the one that would have ensued if Mr. Darwin had had such an intention.

The claim to originality made so distinctly in the opening sentences of the “Origin of Species” is repeated in a letter to Professor Haeckel, written October 8, 1864, and giving an account of the development of his belief in descent with modification.  This letter, part of which is quoted by Mr. Allen, [173a] is given on p. 134 of the English translation of Professor Haeckel’s “History of Creation,” [173b] and runs as follows:—

“In South America three classes of facts were brought strongly before my mind.  Firstly, the manner in which closely allied species replace species in going southward.  Secondly, the close affinity of the species inhabiting the islands near South America to those proper to the continent.  This struck me profoundly, especially the difference of the species in the adjoining islets in the Galapagos Archipelago.  Thirdly, the relation of the living Edentata and Rodentia to the extinct species.  I shall never forget my astonishment when I dug out a gigantic piece of armour like that of the living armadillo.

“Reflecting on these facts, and collecting analogous ones, it seemed to me probable that allied species were descended from a common ancestor.  But during several years I could not conceive how each form could have been modified so as to become admirably adapted to its place in nature.  I began, therefore, to study domesticated animals and cultivated plants, and after a time perceived that man’s power of selecting and breeding from certain individuals was the most powerful of all means in the production of new races.  Having attended to the habits of animals and their relations to the surrounding conditions, I was able to realise the severe struggle for existence to which all organisms are subjected, and my geological observations had allowed me to appreciate to a certain extent the duration of past geological periods.  Therefore, when I happened to read Malthus on population, the idea of natural selection flashed on me.  Of all minor points, the last which I appreciated was the importance and cause of the principle of divergence.”

This is all very naïve, and accords perfectly with the introductory paragraphs of the “Origin of Species;” it gives us the same picture of a solitary thinker, a poor, lonely, friendless student of nature, who had never so much as heard of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, or Lamarck.  Unfortunately, however, we cannot forget the description of the influences which, according to Mr. Grant Allen, did in reality surround Mr. Darwin’s youth, and certainly they are more what we should have expected than those suggested rather than expressly stated by Mr. Darwin.  “Everywhere around him,” says Mr. Allen, [174a] “in his childhood and youth these great but formless” (why “formless”?) “evolutionary ideas were brewing and fermenting.  The scientific society of his elders and of the contemporaries among whom he grew up was permeated with the leaven of Laplace and Lamarck, of Hutton and of Herschel.  Inquiry was especially everywhere rife as to the origin and nature of specific distinctions among plants and animals.  Those who believed in the doctrine of Buffon and of the ‘Zoonomia,’ and those who disbelieved in it, alike, were profoundly interested and agitated in soul by the far-reaching implications of that fundamental problem.  On every side evolutionism, in its crude form.”  (I suppose Mr. Allen could not help saying “in its crude form,” but descent with modification in 1809 meant, to all intents and purposes, and was understood to mean, what it means now, or ought to mean, to most people.)  “The universal stir,” says Mr. Allen on the following page, “and deep prying into evolutionary questions which everywhere existed among scientific men in his early days was naturally communicated to a lad born of a scientific family and inheriting directly in blood and bone the biological tastes and tendencies of Erasmus Darwin.”

I confess to thinking that Mr. Allen’s account of the influences which surrounded Mr. Darwin’s youth, if tainted with picturesqueness, is still substantially correct.  On an earlier page he had written:—“It is impossible to take up any scientific memoirs or treatises of the first half of our own century without seeing at a glance how every mind of high original scientific importance was permeated and disturbed by the fundamental questions aroused, but not fully answered, by Buffon, Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin.  In Lyell’s letters, and in Agassiz’s lectures, in the ‘Botanic Journal’ and in the ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ in treatises on Madeira beetles and the Australian flora, we find everywhere the thoughts of men profoundly influenced in a thousand directions by this universal evolutionary solvent and leaven.

“And while the world of thought was thus seething and moving restlessly before the wave of ideas set in motion by these various independent philosophers, another group of causes in another field was rendering smooth the path beforehand for the future champion of the amended evolutionism.  Geology on the one hand and astronomy on the other were making men’s minds gradually familiar with the conception of slow natural development, as opposed to immediate and miraculous creation.

. . .

“The influence of these novel conceptions upon the growth and spread of evolutionary ideas was far-reaching and twofold.  In the first place, the discovery of a definite succession of nearly related organic forms following one another with evident closeness through the various ages, inevitably suggested to every inquiring observer the possibility of their direct descent one from the other.  In the second place, the discovery that geological formations were not really separated each from its predecessor by violent revolutions, but were the result of gradual and ordinary changes, discredited the old idea of frequent fresh creations after each catastrophe, and familiarised the minds of men of science with the alternative notion of slow and natural evolutionary processes.  The past was seen in effect to be the parent of the present; the present was recognised as the child of the past.”

This is certainly not Mr. Darwin’s own account of the matter.  Probably the truth will lie somewhere between the two extreme views: and on the one hand, the world of thought was not seething quite so badly as Mr. Allen represents it, while on the other, though “three classes of fact,” &c., were undoubtedly “brought strongly before” Mr. Darwin’s “mind in South America,” yet some of them had perhaps already been brought before it at an earlier time, which he did not happen to remember at the moment of writing his letter to Professor Haeckel and the opening paragraph of the “Origin of Species.”

Chapter XIV
Darwin and Descent with Modification (continued)