1866. | Darwin and his Teachings. 157 
diate between allied recent ones, have been found which, had they 
been known at that time, would, to a great extent, have removed 
these difficulties, and would probably have secured a larger share 
of popularity for his doctrine. 
But what appears the strangest of all is that it has been the 
fashion of late with some of the disciples of Darwin, in their zeal 
for the establishment of his theory, to decry or under-estimate the 
value of Lamarck’s doctrine. Not so with the illustrious naturalist 
himself, as any one may find, who refers to his introduction to the 
third edition of his ‘Origin of Species ;’ and we think he has exhi- 
bited a sound judgment in giving full credit to the labours of his 
eminent predecessor. One of his most ardent admirers, however, 
Professor Huxley, told the working classes of London, shortly after 
Darwin’s great work had appeared, that “when people tell them 
that Mr. Darwin’s strongly-based hypothesis is nothing but a mere 
modification of Lamarck’s, they would know what to think of their 
capacity for forming a judgment on the subject.”* 
Why the eminent physiologist in question should thus visit 
with his denunciations those who venture to differ from him on this 
interesting and obscure subject, we are at a loss to understand ; but 
we cannot help admitting that we are guilty of this indiscretion. 
In several portions of Darwin’s work, especially in his paragraphs 
on ‘The Effects of Use and Disuse’ (first edition, p. 134—third 
edition, p. 151), we cannot help seeing a resuscitation of Lamarck’s 
doctrine; and as-to his ‘Law of Progressive Development,’ it 
appears to us about the same as Darwin’s ‘ Law of Variation ;’ and 
a more legitimate mode of expressing a mysterious influence than 
Professor Huxley’s ‘Tendency to Variation.’ “The tendency to 
reproduce the original stock,” says Mr. Huxley, “has, as it were, 
its limits; and side by side with it, there is a tendency to vary in 
certain directions, as if there were two opposing powers working 
upon the organic being—one tending to take it m a straight line, 
the other tending to make it diverge from that straight line first to 
one side and then to another.”{ And again, “This tendency to 
variation is less marked in that mode of propagation which takes 
place asexually; it is in that mode that the minor characters of 
animal and vegetable structures are most completely preserved.” +t 
No one who reflects upon these observations, and the pheno- 
mena of conjugation, generally, can fail to be less strongly impressed 
with its mysterious influences than were Lamarck, Darwin, Professor 
Huxley, and others; and yet men either deny the constant opera- 
tion of the Deity, or are seeking in the past for miracles to glorify 
him, whilst they fail to perceive them in the results of those 
generative processes with which they have become familiarized 
* ‘Lectures to the Working Men’ (Hardwicke), p. 150. 
+ Ibid., p. 89. t Ibid., p. 89. 
