Whether this is an absurdity or no, Professor Lankester will do well to learn to bear it without showing so much warmth, for it is one that is becoming common. Evolution has been accepted not “because of” Mr. Darwin’s doctrine, but because Mr. Darwin so fogged us about his doctrine that we did not understand it. We thought we were backing his bill for descent with modification, whereas we were in reality backing it for descent with modification by means of natural selection from among fortuitous variations. This last really is Mr. Darwin’s theory, except in so far as it is also Mr. A. R. Wallace’s; descent, alone, is just as much and just as little Mr. Darwin’s doctrine as it is Professor Ray Lankester’s or mine. I grant it is in great measure through Mr. Darwin’s books that descent has become so widely accepted; it has become so through his books, but in spite of, rather than by reason of, his doctrine. Indeed his doctrine was no doctrine, but only a back-door for himself to escape by in the event of flood or fire; the flood and fire have come; it remains to be seen how far the door will work satisfactorily.
Professor Ray Lankester, again, should not say that Lamarck’s doctrine has been “so often tried and rejected.” M. Martins, in his edition of the “Philosophie Zoologique,” { 235a} said truly that Lamarck’s theory had never yet had the honour of being seriously discussed. It never has—not at least in connection with the name of its propounder. To mention Lamarck’s name in the presence of the conventional English society naturalist has always been like shaking a red rag at a cow; he is at once infuriated; “as if it were possible,” to quote from Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire, whose defence of Lamarck is one of the best things in his book, { 235b} “that so great labour on the part of so great a naturalist should have led him to ‘a fantastic conclusion’ only—to ‘a flighty error,’ and, as has been often said, though not written, to ‘one absurdity the more.’ Such was the language which Lamarck heard during his protracted old age, saddened alike by the weight of years and blindness; this was what people did not hesitate to utter over his grave, yet barely closed, and what, indeed, they are still saying—commonly too, without any knowledge of what Lamarck maintained, but merely repeating at second hand bad caricatures of his teaching.