" {24} When it was said by Professor Ray
Lankester--who knows as well as most people what Lamarck taught--
that this was "flat Lamarckism," Mr. Wallace rejoined that it was
the survival of the modified individuals that did it all, not the
efforts of the young fish to twist their eyes, and the transmission
to descendants of the effects of those efforts. But this, as I said
in my book, "Evolution, Old and New," {25} is like saying that
horses are swift runners, not by reason of the causes, whatever they
were, that occasioned the direct line of their progenitors to vary
towards ever greater and greater swiftness, but because their more
slow-going uncles and aunts go away. Plain people will prefer to
say that the main cause of any accumulation of favourable
modifications consists rather in that which brings about the initial
variations, and in the fact that these can be inherited at all, than
in the fact that the unmodified individuals were not successful.
People do not become rich because the poor in large numbers go away,
but because they have been lucky, or provident, or more commonly
both. If they would keep their wealth when they have made it they
must exclude luck thenceforth to the utmost of their power, and
their children must follow their example, or they will soon lose
their money. The fact that the weaker go to the wall does not bring
about the greater strength of the stronger; it is the consequence of
this last and not the cause--unless, indeed, it be contended that a
knowledge that the weak go to the wall stimulates the strong to
exertions which they would not otherwise so make, and that these
exertions produce inheritable modifications.
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