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?