This is no more Mr. Darwin's theory
than it is the reader's or my own. Darwin's theory is concerned
only with "the particular means by which the change of species has
been brought about"; his contention being that this is mainly due to
the natural survival of those individuals that have happened by some
accident to be born most favourably adapted to their surroundings,
or, in other words, through accumulation in the common course of
nature of the more lucky variations that chance occasionally
purveys. Mr. Wallace's words, then, in reality amount to this, that
the objections now made to Darwin's theory apply solely to Darwin's
theory, which is all very well as far as it goes, but might have
been more easily apprehended if he had simply said, "There are
several objections now made to Mr. Darwin's theory."
It must be remembered that the passage quoted above occurs on the
first page of a preface dated March 1889, when the writer had
completed his task, and was most fully conversant with his subject.
Nevertheless, it seems indisputable either that he is still
confusing evolution with Mr. Darwin's theory, or that he does not
know when his sentences have point and when they have none.
I should perhaps explain to some readers that Mr. Darwin did not
modify the main theory put forward, first by Buffon, to whom it
indisputably belongs, and adopted from him by Erasmus Darwin,
Lamarck, and many other writers in the latter half of the last
century and the earlier years of the present.
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