INTRODUCTION xxi 



and morphology; abortive or rudimentary organs; 

 recapitulation and conclusion. 



The fact that 17 years before the publication of 

 the Origin my father should have been able to write 

 out so full an outline of his future work, is very 

 remarkable. In his Autobiography 1 he writes of the 

 1844 Essay, "But at that time I overlooked one 

 problem of great importance.... This problem is the 

 tendency in organic beings descended from the 

 same stock to diverge in character as they become 

 modified." The absence of the principle of diver- 

 gence is of course also a characteristic of the 

 Foundations. But at p. 37, the author is not 

 far from this point of view. The passage referred 

 to is: "If any species, A, in changing gets an 

 advantage and that advantage... is inherited, A 

 will be the progenitor of several genera or even 

 families in the hard struggle of nature. A will go 

 on beating out other forms, it might come that A 

 would people (the) earth, we may now not have 

 one descendant on our globe of the one or several 

 original creations." But if the descendants of A 

 have peopled the earth by beating out other forms, 

 they must have diverged in occupying the innumer- 

 able diverse modes of life from which they expelled 

 their predecessors. What I wrote 2 on this subject 

 in 1887 is I think true : " Descent with modification 

 implies divergence, and we become so habituated to 

 a belief in descent, and therefore in divergence, that 

 we do not notice the absence of proof that divergence 

 is in itself an advantage." 



I have called attention in footnotes to many 

 minor points in which the Origin agrees with the 

 Foundations. One of the most interesting is the 

 final sentence on p. 52, which is almost identical with 

 the concluding words of the Origin. I have else- 



1 Life and Letters, i. p. 84. - Life and Letters, ii. p. 15. 



