vidently "which happened to occur" by some
chance of accident unconnected with use and disuse. The word
"accident" is never used, but Mr. Wallace must be credited with this
instance of a desire to give his readers a chance of perceiving that
according to his distinctive feature evolution is an affair of luck,
rather than of cunning. Whether his readers actually did understand
this as clearly as Mr. Wallace doubtless desired that they should,
and whether greater development at this point would not have helped
them to fuller apprehension, we need not now inquire. What was
gained in distinctness might have been lost in distinctiveness, and
after all he did technically put us upon our guard.

Nevertheless, he too at a pinch takes refuge in Lamarckism. In
relation to the manner in which the eyes of soles, turbots, and
other flat-fish travel round the head so as to become in the end
unsymmetrically placed, he says:--

"The eyes of these fish are curiously distorted in order that both
eyes may be upon the upper side, where alone they would be of any
use. . . . Now if we suppose this process, which in the young is
completed in a few days or weeks, to have been spread over thousands
of generations during the development of these fish, those usually
surviving _whose eyes retained more and more of the position into
which the young fish tried to twist them_ [italics mine], the change
becomes intelligible." {261} When it was said by Professor Ray
Lankester--who knows as well as most people what Lamarck taught--
that this was "flat Lamarckism," Mr. Wallace rejoined that it was
the survival of the modified individuals that did it all, not the
efforts of the young fish to twist their eyes, and the transmission
to descendants of the effects of those efforts. But this, as I said
in my book Evolution, Old and New, is like saying that horses are
swift runners, not by reason of the causes, whatever they were, that
occasioned the direct line of their progenitors to vary towards ever
greater and greater swiftness, but because their more slow-going
uncles and aunts go away. Plain people will prefer to say that the
main cause of any accumulation of favourable modifications consists
rather in that which brings about the initial variations, and in the
fact that these can be inherited at all, than in the fact that the
unmodified individuals were not successful. People do not become
rich because the poor in large numbers go away, but bec