y 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 eighteenth
century and the earlier years of the nineteenth. 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 as this, and farther no one can go. The
point at issue between him and his predecessors involves neither the
main fact of evolution, nor yet the geometrical ratio of increase,
and the struggle for existence consequent thereon. Messrs. Darwin
and Wallace have each thrown invaluable light upon these last two
points, but Buffon, as early as 1756, had made them the keystone of
his system. "The movement of nature," he then wrote, "turns on two
immovable pivots: one, the illimitable fecundity which she has
given to all species: the other, the innumerable difficulties which
reduce the results of that fecundity." Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck
followed in the same sense. They thus admit the survival of the
fittest as fully as Mr. Darwin himself, though they do not make use
of this particular expression. The dispute turns not upon natural
selection, which is common to all writers on evolution, but upon the
nature and causes of the variations