though the words “natural selection” are not employed; but it is the true natural selection which (if so metaphorical an expression is allowed to pass) actually does take place with the results ascribed to it by Lamarck, and not the false Charles-Darwinian natural selection that does not correspond with facts, and cannot result in specific differences such as we now observe.  But, waiving this, the “my’s,” within which a little rift had begun to show itself in 1866, might well become as mute in 1869 as they could become without attracting attention, when Mr. Darwin saw the passages just quoted, and the hundred pages or so that lie between them.

I suppose Mr. Darwin cut out the five more my’s that disappeared in 1872 because he had not yet fully recovered from his scare, and allowed nine to remain in order to cover his retreat, and tacitly say that he had not done anything and knew nothing whatever about it.  Practically, indeed, he had not retreated, and must have been well aware that he was only retreating technically; for he must have known that the absence of acknowledgment to any earlier writers in the body of his work, and the presence of the many passages in which every word conveyed the impression that the writer claimed descent with modification, amounted to a claim as much when the actual word “my” had been taken out as while it was allowed to stand.  We took Mr. Darwin at his own estimate because we could not for a moment suppose that a man of means, position, and education,—­one, moreover, who was nothing if he was not unself-seeking—­could play such a trick upon us while pretending to take us into his confidence; hence the almost universal belief on the part of the public, of which Professors Haeckel and Ray Lankester and Mr. Grant Allen alike complain—­namely, that Mr. Darwin is the originator of the theory of descent, and that his variations are mainly functional.  Men of science must not be surprised if the readiness with which we responded to Mr. Darwin’s appeal to our confidence is succeeded by a proportionate resentment when the peculiar shabbiness of his action becomes more generally understood.  For myself, I know not which most to wonder at—­the meanness of the writer himself, or the greatness of the service that, in spite of that meanness, he unquestionably rendered.

If Mr. Darwin had been dealing fairly by us, when he saw that we had failed to catch the difference between the Erasmus-Darwinian theory of descent through natural selection from among variations that are mainly functional, and his own alternative theory of descent through natural selection from among variations that are mainly accidental, and, above all, when he saw we were crediting him with other men’s work, he would have hastened to set us right.  “It is with great regret,” he might have written, “and with no small surprise, that I find how generally I have been misunderstood as claiming to be the originator of the theory of descent with modification;