the manner
in which Mr. Darwin tried to sit on the two stools of use and disuse, and
natural selection of accidental variations, at the same time. The knell
of Charles-Darwinism is rung in Mr. Wallace's present book, and in the
general perception on the part of biologists that we must either assign
to use and disuse such a predominant share in modification as to make it
the feature most proper to be insisted on, or deny that the
modifications, whether of mind or body, acquired during a single
lifetime, are ever transmitted at all. If they can be inherited at all,
they can be accumulated. If they can be accumulated at all, they can be
so, for anything that appears to the contrary, to the extent of the
specific and generic differences with which we are surrounded. The only
thing to do is to pluck them out root and branch: they are as a cancer
which, if the smallest fibre be left unexcised, will grow again, and kill
any system on to which it is allowed to fasten. Mr. Wallace, therefore,
may well be excused if he casts longing eyes towards Weismannism.

And what was Mr. Darwin's system? Who can make head or tail of the
inextricable muddle in which he left it? The "Origin of Species" in its
latest shape is the reduction of hedging to an absurdity. How did Mr.
Darwin himself leave it in the last chapter of the last edition of the
"Origin of Species"? He wrote:--

"I have now recapitulated the facts and considerations which have
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."

The "numerous, successive, slight, favourable variations" above referred
to are intended to be fortuitous, accidental, spontaneous. It is the
essence of Mr. Darwin's theory that this should be so. Mr. Darwin's
solemn statement, therefore, of his theory, after he had done his best or
his worst with it,