onception of Darwin's work. How far he has succeeded
is a point on which opinion will probably be divided. Those who find Mr.
Darwin's works clear will also find no difficulty in understanding Mr.
Wallace; those, on the other hand, who find Mr. Darwin puzzling are
little likely to be less puzzled by Mr. Wallace. He continues:--

"The objections now made to Darwin's theory apply solely to the
particular means by which the change of species has been brought about,
not to the fact of that change."

But "Darwin's theory"--as Mr. Wallace has elsewhere proved that he
understands--has no reference "to the fact of that change"--that is to
say, to the fact that species have been modified in course of descent
from other species. This is no more Mr. Darwin's theory than it is the
reader's or my own. Darwin's theory is concerned only with "the
particular means by which the change of species has been brought about";
his contention being that this is mainly due to the natural survival of
those individuals that have happened by some accident to be born most
favourably adapted to their surroundings, or, in other words, through
accumulation in the common course of nature of the more lucky variations
that chance occasionally purveys. Mr. Wallace's words, then, in reality
amount to this, that the objections now made to Darwin's theory apply
solely to Darwin's theory, which is all very well as far as it goes, but
might have been more easily apprehended if he had simply said, "There are
several objections now made to Mr. Darwin's theory."

It must be remembered that the passage quoted above occurs on the first
page of a preface dated March 1889, when the writer had completed his
task, and was most fully conversant with his subject. Nevertheless, it
seems indisputable either that he is still confusing evolution with Mr.
Darwin's theory, or that he does not know when his sentences have point
and when they have none.

I should perhaps explain to some readers that Mr. Darwin did not modify
the main theory put forward, first by Buffon, to whom it indisputably
belongs, and adopted from him by Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, and many other
writers in the latter half of the last century and the earlier years of
the present. The early evolutionists maintained that all existing forms
of animal and vegetable life, including man, were derived in course of
descent with modification from forms resembling the lowest now known.

Mr. Darwin went as far