kind as that which is denuding a modern one, though its effect may vary in geometrical ratio with the effect it has produced already. As we are extending reason to the lower animals, so we must extend a system of moral government by rewards and punishments no less surely; and if we admit that to some considerable extent man is man, and master of his fate, we should admit also that all organic forms which are saved at all have been in proportionate degree masters of their fate too, and have worked out, not only their own salvation, but their salvation according, in no small measure, to their own goodwill and pleasure, at times with a light heart, and at times in fear and trembling. I do not say that Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck saw all the foregoing as clearly as it is easy to see it now; what I have said, however, is only the natural development of their system.

CHAPTER SIX: STATEMENT OF THE QUESTION AT ISSUE (continued)

O MUCH FOR THE OLDER VIEW; AND NOW FOR the more modern opinion. According to Messrs. Darwin and Wallace, and ostensibly, I am afraid I should add, a great majority of our most prominent biologists, the view taken by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck is not a sound one. Some organisms, indeed, are so admirably adapted to their surroundings, and some organs discharge their functions with so much appearance of provision, that we are apt to think they must owe their development to sense of need and consequent contrivance, but this opinion is fantastic; the appearance of design is delusive; what we are tempted to see as an accumulated outcome of desire and cunning, we should regard as mainly an accumulated outcome of good luck.

Let us take the eye as a somewhat crucial example. It is a seeing-machine, or thing to see with. So is a telescope; the telescope in its highest development is a secular accumulation of cunning, sometimes small, sometimes great; sometimes applied to this detail of the instrument, and sometimes to that. It is an admirable example of design; nevertheless, as I said in Evolution, Old and New, he who made the first rude telescope had probably no idea of any more perfect form of the instrument than the one he had himself invented. Indeed, if he had, he would have carried his idea out in practice. He would have been unable to conceive such an instrument as Lord Rosse's; the design, therefore, at present evidenced by the telescope was not design all on the part of one and the same person. Nor yet was it unmixed with chance; many a detail has been doubtless due to an accident or coincidence which was forthwith seized and made the best of. Luck there always has been and always will be, until all brains are opened, and all connections made known, but luck turned to account becomes design; there is, indeed, if things are driven home, little other design than this. The telescope, therefore, is an instrument designed in all its parts for the purpose of seeing, and, take it all round, designed with singular skill.

Looking at the eye, we are at first tempted to think that it must be the telescope over again, only more so; we are tempted to see it as something which has grown up little by little from small beginnings, as the result of effort well applied and handed down from generation to generation, till, in the vastly greater time during which the eye has been developing as compared with the telescope, a vastly more astonishing result has been arrived at. We may indeed be tempted to think this, but, according to Mr. Darwin, we should be wrong. Design had a great deal to do with the telescope, but it had nothing or hardly anything whatever to do with the eye. The telescope owes its development to cunning, the eye to luck, which, it would seem, is so far more cunning than cunning that one does not quite understand why there should be any cunning at all. The main means of developing the eye was, according to Mr. Darwin, not use as varying circumstances might direct with consequent slow increase of power and an occasional happy flight of genius, but natural selection. Natural selection, according to him, though not the sole, is still the most important means of its development and modification.' What, then, is natural selection?

Mr. Darwin has told us this on the title-page of the Origin of Species. He there defines it as "The Preservation of Favoured Races"; "Favoured" is "Fortunate," and "Fortunate " Lucky"; it is plain, therefore, that with Mr. Darwin natural selection comes to "The Preservation of Lucky Races," and that he regarded luck as the most important feature in connection with the development even of so apparently purposive an organ as the eye, and as the one, therefore, on which it was most proper to insist. And what is luck but absence of intention or design? What, then, can Mr. Darwin's title-page amount to when written out plainly, but to an assertion that the main means of modification has been the preservation of races whose variations have been unintentional, that is to say, not connected with Origin of Species, 1st ed., p. 6; see also p. 43.

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effort or intention, devoid of mind or meaning, fortuitous, spontaneous, accidental, or whatever kindred word is least disagreeable to the reader? It is impossible to conceive any more complete denial of mind as having had anything to do with organic development, than is involved in the title-page of the Origin of Species when its doubtless carefully considered words are studied-nor, let me add, is it possible to conceive a title-page more likely to make the reader's attention rest much on the main doctrine of evolution, and little, to use the words now most in vogue concerning it, on Mr. Darwin's own" distinctive feature.

It should be remembered that the full title of the Origin of Species is, On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. The significance of the expansion of the title escaped the greater number of Mr. Darwin's readers. Perhaps it ought not to have done so, but we certainly failed to catch it. The very words themselves escaped us-and yet there they were all the time if we had only chosen to look. We thought the book was called On the Origin of Species, and so it was on the outside; so it was also on the inside fly-leaf; so it was on the title-page itself as long as the most prominent type was used; the expanded title was only given once, and then in smaller type; so the three big Origins of Species carried us

with them to the exclusion of the rest.

The short and working title, On the Origin of Species, in effect claims descent with modification generally; the expanded and technically true title only claims the discovery that luck is the main means of organic modification, and this is a very different matter. The book ought to have been entitled, On Natural Selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life, as the main means of the origin of species; this should have been the expanded title, and the short title should have been On Natural Selection. The title would not then have involved an important difference between its working and its technical forms, and it would have better fulfilled the object of a title, which is, of course, to give, as

far as may be, the essence of a book in a nutshell. We learn on the authority of Mr. Darwin himself1 that the Origin of Species was originally intended to bear the title Natural Selection; nor is it easy to see why the change should have been made if an accurate expression of the contents of the book was the only thing which Mr. Darwin was considering. It is curious that, writing the later chapters of Life and Habit in great haste, I should have accidentally referred to the Origin of Species as Natural Selection; it seems hard to believe that there was no intention in my thus unconsciously reverting to Mr. Darwin's own original title, but there certainly was none, and I did not then know what the original title had been.

If we had scrutinized Mr. Darwin's title-page as closely as we should certainly scrutinize anything written by Mr. Darwin now, we should have seen that the title did not technically claim the theory of descent; practically, however, it so turned out that we unhesitatingly gave that theory to the author, being, as I have said, carried away by the three large Origins of Species (which we understood as much the same thing as descent with modification), and finding, as I shall show in a later chapter, that descent was ubiquitously claimed throughout the work, either expressly or by implication, as Mr. Darwin's theory. It is not easy to see how any one with ordinary instincts could hesitate to believe that Mr. Darwin was entitled to claim what he claimed with so much insistence. If ars est celare artem Mr. Darwin must be allowed to have been a consummate artist, for it took us years to understand the ins and outs of what had been done.

I may say in passing that we never see the Origin of Species spoken of as On the Origin of Species, etc., or as The Origin of Species, etc. (the word "on" being dropped in the latest editions). The distinctive feature of the book lies, according to its admirers, in the " etc.," but they never give it. To

"I think it can be shown that there is such a power at work in Natural Selection (the title of my book)."-Proceedings of the Linnean Society for 1858, vol. iii, p. 51.