290 THE SPREAD OF EVOLUTION. [ch. xiv. 



be found in a species which presents the incipient character 

 in a large number of its individuals. This point of view 

 was of course perfectly familiar to him, it was this that in- 

 duced him to study " unconscious selection," where a breed 

 is formed by the long-continued preservation by Man of all 

 those individuals which are best adapted to his needs : not 

 as in the art of the professed breeder, where a single indi- 

 vidual is picked out to breed from. 



It is impossible to give in a short compass an account of 

 Fleeming Jenkin's argument. My father's copy of the 

 paper (ripped out of the volume as usual, and tied with a 

 bit of string) is annotated in pencil in many places. I 

 quote a passage opposite which my father has written "good 

 sneers " but it should be remembered that he used the word 

 " sneer " in rather a special sense, not as necessarily imj)ly- 

 ing a feeling of bitterness in the critic, but rather in the 

 sense of " banter." Speaking of the " true believer," Flee- 

 ming Jenkin says, p. 293 : 



" He can invent trains of ancestors of whose existence 

 there is no evidence ; he can marshal hosts of equally imagi- 

 nary foes ; he can call up continents, floods, and peculiar 

 atmospheres ; he can dry up oceans, split islands, and parcel 

 out eternity at will ; surely with these advantages he must 

 be a dull fellow if he cannot scheme some series of animals 

 and circumstances explaining our assumed difficulty quite 

 naturally. Feeling the difficulty of dealing with adversaries 

 who command so huge a domain of fancy, we will abandon 

 these arguments, and trust to those which at least cannot be 

 assailed by mere efforts of imagination." 



In the fifth edition of the Origin, my father altered a 

 passage in the Historical Sketch (fourth edition, p. xviii.). 

 He thus practically gave up the difficult task of understand- 

 ing whether or not Sir R. Owen claims to have discovered 

 the principle of Natural Selection. Adding, " As far as 

 the mere enunciation of the principle of Natural Selection 

 is concerned, it is quite immaterial whether or not Professor 

 Owen preceded me, for both of us . . . were long ago pre- 

 ceded by Dr. Wells and Mr. Matthew." 



The desire that his views might spread in France was 

 always strong with my father, and he was therefore justly 

 annoyed to find that in 1869 the publisher of the French 

 edition had brought out a third edition without consulting 

 the author. He was accordingly glad to enter into an 

 arrangement for a French translation of the fifth edition ; 



