OTHER THEORIES OF EVOLUTION loi 



calls them. But that view, although he argues it with 

 much eloquence, has not been widely accepted, and 

 I think it will be generally admitted that it does not 

 yet rest on sufficient proof. 



In addition to these, there are some who maintain the 

 position that there is an unknown cause of evolution. 

 They believe that these theories, although one or more 

 of them may be of value, are yet insufficient to account 

 for organic evolution. Those who take this line are of 

 course logically bound to bring forward the classes of 

 facts with which no existing theory is, as they maintain, 

 competent to deal. 



All we shall have time for to-night is briefly to compare 

 Natural Selection, the Darwinian interpretation of evolu- 

 tion, with the Lamarckian Theory. It is interesting to 

 note that, although they are so essentially distinct one 

 from another, in earlier times these two theories appear 

 to have been entirely confused. Lamarckian Evolution, 

 Spencerian Evolution, appeals to the mind of man far 

 more strongly than Darwinian Evolution. Any one of 

 us, were he to have created the organic world, would 

 certainly have created it according to Lamarck. We 

 should have made evolution by use and disuse of parts, 

 and not by Natural Selection. However, we are not 

 concerned with the sort of world that we should have 

 created. The question before us as scientific men is 

 not what might have happened, but what has happened. 

 Nature, as I have heard Prof. Michael Foster say, has 

 a very queer way of going by roundabout paths and 

 refusing to take the roads we should lay out for her 

 ourselves, — roads which we look upon as the most direct 

 and obvious. The fact that the general aspect of the 

 Lamarckian Theory commends itself to the human mind 

 affords no reason for looking upon it as the correct one, 

 as opposed to the Darwinian Theory. 



The Duke of Argyll, who is still strongly antagonistic 

 to Natural Selection, a few years ago wrote an article 

 in The NineteeittJi Centtcry called The Power of Loose 

 Analogy, By this title he intended to imply that those 

 who believe in Natural Selection have been led away 



