ON THE CAUSES OF VARIATION. 815 



sified, or the desire strongly centered in some particular object. 

 The conception is perfectly legitimate, for instance, that when a 

 species is subjected to any external modifying cause, affecting all 

 its members alike, the adaptive modifications which natural 

 selection, under such circumstances, would play upon, have their 

 origin in the emotions, or the influences at work on the pregnant 

 females, giving direction in their offspring, to the needed changes. 

 In this way it is probable that only those individuals born under 

 such conditions would be able to survive. Thus this becomes no 

 mere ancillary cause of variation, but one of deepest import and at 

 the very foundation of evolution. The female in this light ac- 

 quires an increased importance, and evolution finds her not only 

 the essential at the dawn of life upon our planet, but, in its pres- 

 ent highest manifestations, she is nearest by instinct, intuition, 

 and aspiration to the Controlling Mind which in the beginning 

 quickened the great womb of Nature and down through all the 

 ages guided the continuous stream of life to designed ends 

 through the womb of the individual mother. 



As already remarked, the psychical factors which we have 

 been considering are substantially Lamarckian, and in proportion 

 as we consider them and get to understand the other direct causes 

 of variation, must we give importance to the ideas of Lamarck 

 and, conversely, less importance to the ideas of Darwin. 



Did time permit, I should like to go into an analysis of La- 

 marck's " Philosophie zoologique," and show how the genius of 

 this illustrious French naturalist anticipated a very large part of 

 that which Darwin subsequently so laboriously helped to estab- 

 lish. I must pass the subject, however, and simply record my 

 surprise that one who was otherwise so honest and fair toward 

 other writers, was so evidently unfair in his estimate of the work 

 of Lamarck, as Darwin, in the " Life and Letters," is shown to 

 have been. It is incomprehensible, reading Lamarck with our 

 present knowledge, that Darwin should have found neither fact 

 nor ideas in a book which abounds in both, except on the theory 

 of a poor translation or that strange national antipathy which 

 has so often prevented the people of one country from doing jus- 

 tice to those of the other^ and which so long prejudiced the 

 French Academy against Darwin's own especial theories. 



Darwinism assumes essential ignorance of the causes of vari- 

 ation, and is based on the inherent tendency thereto in the off- 

 spring. Lamarckism, on the contrary, recognizes in use and dis- 

 use, desire and the physical environment, immediate causes of 

 variation affecting the individual and transmitted to the offspring, 

 in which it may be intensified again both by inheritance and fur- 

 ther individual modification. Both represent important princi- 

 ples in evolution and co-operate to bring about the results. The 



