specific Genesis 107 



cious attempts to deny that Mr. Darwin's opinions have 

 undergone any grave modifications. Then indeed truth and 

 justice demand the production of such admissions. They do 

 so since the assignment of the law of Natural Selection to a 

 subordinate place is manifestly an abandonment of the 

 Darwinian theory as originally proposed ; for how can that 

 be said to be the origin of species which only co-operates, 

 in an inferior and comparatively uninfluential manner, in 

 determining that origin ? 



Mr. Chauncey Wright's remarks seem to me, then, to 

 render necessary a reference to these earlier statements of Mr. 

 Darwin. A number of such statements ^ and admissions of 

 our great naturalist — not, indeed, his earliest, but from his 

 Descent of Man and the third edition of The Origin of 

 Species — were recently brought forward in the July number 

 of the Quarterly Review.^ They were published in that 

 periodical for the purpose of guarding the public from a 

 hasty acceptance of Mr. Darwin's dogmatic expressions, 

 merely in deference to his authority, and without a careful 

 estimate of the value of the facts brought forward by him. 



The passages referred to seemed to me to contain state- 

 ments amply sufficient to repel Mr. Wright's charge against 

 me of injustice to Mr. Darwin, and to show, on the one hand, 

 that the original theory of the origin of species was such as I 

 have represented it to have been ; and, on the other, that Mr. 

 Darwin has, in fact, abandoned the position which he origin- 

 ally took up. 



From the passages referred to we may learn that Mr. 

 Darwin, even so lately as in his third edition of the Origin, 

 considered that Natural Selection acts only by numerous 



1 They are to be found in The Origin of Species, 3rd edition, pp. 208, 214, 

 220, 223 ; 5th edition, p. 104. The Descent of Man, vol. i. pp. 125, 152, 154, 

 223; vol. ii. pp. 176, 198, 387, and the postscript at the beginning of the 

 volume. Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. ii. p. 57. 



^ See ante, pp. 5-7. 



