orld about the interest attaching to
design in organism? Neither has the passage any connection with the rest
of the preface. There is not another word about design, and even here
Mr. Darwin seems mainly anxious to face both ways, and pat design as it
were on the head while not committing himself to any proposition which
could be disputed.

The explanation is sufficiently obvious. Mr. Darwin wanted to hedge. He
saw that the design which his works had been mainly instrumental in
pitchforking out of organisms no less manifestly designed than a
burglar's jemmy is designed, had nevertheless found its way back again,
and that though, as I insisted in Evolution, Old and New, and Unconscious
Memory, it must now be placed within the organism instead of outside it,
as "was formerly the case," it was not on that account any the
less--design, as well as interesting.

I should like to have seen Mr. Darwin say this more explicitly. Indeed I
should have liked to have seen Mr. Darwin say anything at all about the
meaning of which there could be no mistake, and without contradicting
himself elsewhere; but this was not Mr. Darwin's manner.

In passing I will give another example of Mr. Darwin's manner when he did
not quite dare even to hedge. It is to be found in the preface which he
wrote to Professor Weismann's Studies in the Theory of Descent, published
in 1882.

"Several distinguished naturalists," says Mr. Darwin, "maintain with much
confidence that organic beings tend to vary and to rise in the scale,
independently of the conditions to which they and their progenitors have
been exposed; whilst others maintain that all variation is due to such
exposure, though the manner in which the environment acts is as yet quite
unknown. At the present time there is hardly any question in biology of
more importance than this of the nature and causes of variability, and
the reader will find in the present work an able discussion on the whole
subject which will probably lead him to pause before he admits the
existence of an innate tendency to perfectibility"--or towards, _being
able to be perfected_.

I could find no able discussion upon the whole subject in Professor
Weismann's book. There was a little something here and there, but not
much.

Mr Herbert Spencer has not in his more recent works said anything which
enables me to appeal to his authority.

I imagine that if he had got hold of the idea that heredity was only a
mode o