ESTIMATES OF HIS CHARACTER AND WORK 73 
remembering when it was written, I felt I had done 
him injustice. 
“ Even as to man’s gradual acquisition of more and 
more ideas, and then of speech slowly as the ideas 
multiplied, and then his persecution of the beings 
most nearly allied and competing with him—all this 
is very Darwinian. 
“The substitution of the variety-making power for 
‘volition,’ ‘muscular action,’ ete. (and in plants even 
volition was not called in), isin some respects only 
a change of names. Call a new variety a new crea- 
tion, one may say of the former, as of the latter, what 
you say when you observe that the creationist explains 
nothing, and only affirms ‘it is so because it Is so.’ 
‘“‘Lamarck’s belief in the slow changes in the or- 
ganic and inorganic world in the year 1800 was surely 
above the standard of his times, and he was right 
about progression in the main, though you have 
vastly advanced that doctrine. As to Owen in his 
‘Aye Aye’ paper, he seems to me a disciple of Pou- 
chet, who converted him at Rouen to ‘spontaneous 
generation.’ 
“Have I not, at p. 412, put the vast distinction be- 
tween you and Lamarck as to ‘necessary progres- 
sion’ strongly enough?” (To Darwin, March 15, 1863. 
Wiyell, s Letters, ii. p. 305.) 
Darwin, in the freedom of private correspondence, 
paid scant respect to the views of his renowned pre- 
decessor, as the following extracts from his published 
letters will show: 
“ Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of 
a ‘tendency to progression,’ ‘adaptations from the 
slow willing of animals,’ etc. But the conclusions I 
am led to are not widely different from his; though 
the means of change are wholly so.” (Darwin's Lzfe 
and Letters, ii., p. 23, 1844.) 
