“They do not seem to be aware of this, for they make no attempt to examine Mr. Darwin’s accumulated facts and arguments.” Professor Ray Lankester need not shake Mr. Darwin’s “accumulated facts and arguments” at us. We have taken more pains to understand them than Professor Ray Lankester has taken to understand Lamarck, and by this time know them sufficiently. We thankfully accept by far the greater number, and rely on them as our sheet-anchors to save us from drifting on to the quicksands of Neo-Darwinian natural selection; few of them, indeed, are Mr. Darwin’s, except in so far as he has endorsed them and given them publicity, but I do not know that this detracts from their value. We have paid great attention to Mr. Darwin’s facts, and if we do not understand all his arguments—for it is not always given to mortal man to understand these—yet we think we know what he was driving at. We believe we understand this to the full as well as Mr. Darwin intended us to do, and perhaps better. Where the arguments tend to show that all animals and plants are descended from a common source we find them much the same as Buffon’s, or as those of Erasmus Darwin or Lamarck, and have nothing to say against them; where, on the other hand, they aim at proving that the main means of modification has been the fact that if an animal has been “favoured” it will be “preserved”—then we think that the animal’s own exertions will, in the long run, have had more to do with its preservation than any real or fancied “favour.” Professor Ray Lankester continues:—
“The doctrine of evolution has become an accepted truth” (Professor Ray Lankester writes as though the making of truth and falsehood lay in the hollow of Mr. Darwin’s hand. Surely “has become accepted” should be enough; Mr. Darwin did not make the doctrine true) “entirely in consequence of Mr. Darwin’s having demonstrated the mechanism.” (There is no mechanism in the matter, and if there is, Mr. Darwin did not show it. He made some words which confused us and prevented us from seeing that “the preservation of favoured races” was a cloak for “luck,” and that this was all the explanation he was giving) “by which the evolution is possible; it was almost universally rejected, while such undemonstrable agencies as those arbitrarily asserted to exist by Professor Semper and Mr. George Henslow were the only means suggested by its advocates.”
Undoubtedly the theory of descent with modification, which received its first sufficiently ample and undisguised exposition in 1809 with the “Philosophie Zoologique” of Lamarck, shared the common fate of all theories that revolutionise opinion on important matters, and was fiercely opposed by the Huxleys, Romaneses, Grant Allens, and Ray Lankesters of its time. It had to face the reaction in favour of the Church which began in the days of the First Empire, as a natural consequence of the horrors of the Revolution; it had to face the social influence and then almost Darwinian reputation of Cuvier, whom Lamarck could not, or would not, square; it was put forward by one who was old, poor, and ere long blind. What theory could do more than just keep itself alive under conditions so unfavourable? Even under the most favourable conditions descent with modification would have been a hard plant to rear, but, as things were, the wonder is that it was not killed outright at once. We all know how large a share social influences have in deciding what kind of reception a book or theory is to meet with; true, these influences are not permanent, but at first they are almost irresistible; in reality it was not the theory of descent that was matched against that of fixity, but Lamarck against Cuvier; who can be surprised that Cuvier for a time should have had the best of it?
And yet it is pleasant to reflect that his triumph was not, as triumphs go, long lived. How is Cuvier best known now? As one who missed a great opportunity; as one who was great in small things, and stubbornly small in great ones. Lamarck died in 1831; in 1861 descent with modification was almost universally accepted by those most competent to form an opinion. This result was by no means so exclusively due to Mr. Darwin’s “Origin of Species” as is commonly believed. During the thirty years that followed 1831 Lamarck’s opinions made more way than Darwinians are willing to allow. Granted that in 1861 the theory was generally accepted under the name of Darwin, not under that of Lamarck, still it was Lamarck and not Darwin that was being accepted; it was descent, not descent with modification by means of natural selection from among fortuitous variations, that we carried away with us from the “Origin of Species.” The thing triumphed whether the name was lost or not. I need not waste the reader’s time by showing further how little weight he need attach to the fact that Lamarckism was not immediately received with open arms by an admiring public. The theory of descent has become accepted as rapidly, if I am not mistaken, as the Copernican theory, or as Newton’s theory of gravitation.
When Professor Ray Lankester goes on to speak of the “undemonstrable agencies” “arbitrarily asserted” to exist by Professor Semper, he is again presuming on the ignorance of his readers. Professor Semper’s agencies are in no way more undemonstrable than Mr. Darwin’s are. Mr. Darwin was perfectly cogent as long as he stuck to Lamarck’s demonstration; his arguments were sound as long as they were Lamarck’s, or developments of, and riders upon, Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, and almost incredibly silly when they were his own. Fortunately the greater part of the “Origin of Species” is devoted to proving the theory of descent with modification, by arguments against which no exception would have been taken by Mr. Darwin’s three great precursors, except in so far as the variations whose accumulation results in specific difference are supposed to be fortuitous—and, to do Mr. Darwin justice, the fortuitousness, though always within hail, is kept as far as possible in the background.
“Mr. Darwin’s arguments,” says Professor Ray Lankester, “rest on the proved existence of minute, many-sided, irrelative variations not produced by directly transforming agents.” Mr. Darwin throughout the body of the “Origin of Species” is not supposed to know what his variations are or are not produced by; if they come, they come, and if they do not come, they do not come. True, we have seen that in the last paragraph of the book all this was changed, and the variations were ascribed to the conditions of existence, and to use and disuse, but a concluding paragraph cannot be allowed to override a whole book throughout which the variations have been kept to hand as accidental. Mr. Romanes is perfectly correct when he says [232a] that “natural selection” (meaning the Charles-Darwinian natural selection) “trusts to the chapter of accidents in the matter of variation” this is all that Mr. Darwin can tell us; whether they come from directly transforming agents or no he neither knows nor says. Those who accept Lamarck will know that the agencies are not, as a rule, directly transforming, but the followers of Mr. Darwin cannot.
“But showing themselves,” continues Professor Ray Lankester, “at each new act of reproduction, as part of the phenomena of heredity such minute ‘sports’ or ‘variations’ are due to constitutional disturbance” (No doubt. The difference, however, between Mr. Darwin and Lamarck consists in the fact that Lamarck believes he knows what it is that so disturbs the constitution as generally to induce variation, whereas Mr. Darwin says he does not know), “and appear not in individuals subjected to new conditions” (What organism can pass through life without being subjected to more or less new conditions? What life is ever the exact fac-simile of another? And in a matter of such extreme delicacy as the adjustment of psychical and physical relations, who can say how small a disturbance of established equilibrium may not involve how great a rearrangement?), “but in the offspring of all, though more freely in the offspring of those subjected to special causes of constitutional disturbance. Mr. Darwin has further proved that these slight variations can be transmitted and intensified by selective breeding.”
Mr. Darwin did, indeed, follow Buffon and Lamarck in at once turning to animals and plants under domestication in order to bring the plasticity of organic forms more easily home to his readers, but the fact that variations can be transmitted and intensified by selective breeding had been so well established and was so widely known long before Mr. Darwin was born, that he can no more be said to have proved it than Newton can be said to have proved the revolution of the earth on its own axis. Every breeder throughout the world had known it for centuries. I believe even Virgil knew it.
“They have,” continues Professor Ray Lankester, “in reference to breeding, a remarkably tenacious, persistent character, as might be expected from their origin in connection with the reproductive process.”
The variations do not normally “originate in connection with the reproductive process,” though it is during this process that they receive organic expression. They originate mainly, so far as anything originates anywhere, in the life of the parent or parents. Without going so far as to say that no variation can arise in connection with the reproductive system—for, doubtless, striking and successful sports do occasionally so arise—it is more probable that the majority originate earlier. Professor Ray Lankester proceeds:—