Stripped of detail the point at issue is this;—whether luck or cunning is the fitter to be insisted on as the main means of organic development. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck answered this question in favour of cunning. They settled it in favour of intelligent perception of the situation—within, of course, ever narrower and narrower limits as organism retreats farther backwards from ourselves—and persistent effort to turn it to account. They made this the soul of all development whether of mind or body.
And they made it, like all other souls, liable to aberration both for better and worse. They held that some organisms show more ready wit and _savoir faire_ than others; that some give more proofs of genius and have more frequent happy thoughts than others, and that some have even gone through waters of misery which they have used as wells.
The sheet anchor both of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck is in good sense and thrift; still they are aware that money has been sometimes made by “striking oil,” and ere now been transmitted to descendants in spite of the haphazard way in which it was originally acquired. No speculation, no commerce; “nothing venture, nothing have,” is as true for the development of organic wealth as for that of any other kind, and neither Erasmus Darwin nor Lamarck hesitated about admitting that highly picturesque and romantic incidents of developmental venture do from time to time occur in the race histories even of the dullest and most dead-level organisms under the name of “sports;” but they would hold that even these occur most often and most happily to those that have persevered in well-doing for some generations. Unto the organism that hath is given, and from the organism that hath not is taken away; so that even “sports” prove to be only a little off thrift, which still remains the sheet anchor of the early evolutionists. They believe, in fact, that more organic wealth has been made by saving than in any other way. The race is not in the long run to the phenomenally swift nor the battle to the phenomenally strong, but to the good average all-round organism that is alike shy of Radical crotchets and old world obstructiveness. _Festina_, but _festina lente_—perhaps as involving so completely the contradiction in terms which must underlie all modification—is the motto they would assign to organism, and _Chi va piano va lontano_, they hold to be a maxim as old, if not as the hills (and they have a hankering even after these), at any rate as the amœba.