Again, Dr. Bree, in “Species not Transmutable,” says:
“The only real difference between Mr. Darwin and his two predecessors, [Lamarck and the “Vestiges”] is this:—that while the latter have each given a mode by which they conceive the great changes they believe in have been brought about, Mr. Darwin does no such thing.”
One of the most interesting of the countless examples of misunderstanding is contained in a recently published letter from W. S. Macleay to Robert Lowe.[H] This letter was written from Elizabeth Bay, and is dated May, 1860, evidently just after the first edition of the “Origin,” a copy of which had been sent by Robert Lowe, had been read by Macleay.
“Again if this primordial cell had a Creator, as Darwin seems to admit, I do not see what we gain by denying the Creator, as Darwin does, all management of it after its creation. Lamarck was more logical in supposing it to have existed of itself from all eternity—indeed this is the principal difference that I see between this theory of Darwin’s and that of Lamarck, who propounded everything essential in the former theory, in a work now rather rare—his ‘Philosophie Zoologique.’ But you may see an abridgment of it in so common a book as his ‘Histoire Nat. des Animaux Vertébrés,’ vol. i., pp. 188, et seq.—Edit. 1818, where the examples given of natural selection are the gasteropod molluscs.... Natural selection (sometimes called ‘struggles’ by Darwin) is identical with the ‘Besoins des Choses’ of Lamarck, who, by means of his hypothesis, for instance, assigns the constant stretching of the neck to reach the acacia leaves as the cause of the extreme length of it in the giraffe; much in the same way the black bear, according to Darwin, became a whale, which I believe as little as his other assertion that our progenitors anciently had gills—only they had dropped off by want of use in the course of myriads of generations.”
I had long been anxious to possess a copy of the first edition of the “Origin,” and was fortunate enough to come across one about the time when Macleay’s letter was pointed out to me by my wife. I opened the title-page, and found upon it the signature “W. S. Macleay”; it must have been the very volume given him by Robert Lowe, which Macleay had read and believed he had been fairly criticising. Out of Macleay’s volume, therefore, I quote the sentences he referred to in his letter.
Darwin’s real statement about the black bear which “became a whale” is to be found on page 184:—
“In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.”
The statement about the gills which “dropped off by want of use” becomes in the original (p. 191):—
“In the higher vertebrata the branchiæ have wholly disappeared—the slits on the sides of the neck and the loop-like course of the arteries still marking in the embryo their former position.”
Although the hypothetical case of the black bear—carefully guarded as it is—does not now appear to us at all extravagant (indeed, in the cleft cheeks of the goat-sucker we have a precisely analogous case), Darwin seems to have thought it unsuitable, probably because it became an easy butt for ignorant ridicule. We find accordingly that in the second and all subsequent editions everything after the word “water” is omitted, while “almost” is inserted before “like a whale.” He was alluding to this passage when he wrote to Lyell (December 22nd, 1859): “Thanks about ‘Bears,’ a word of ill-omen to me.” Furthermore, Andrew Murray[I] says, concerning the sentences as they stand in the first edition:—