272 PARWINIANISM. 



incipient variation of seals feeding on the shore;" and 

 he might very well have addled, neither do I know of 

 any such in the other cases, birds, bats, insects, elephants, 

 bears, or whales: they are only supposititious. Lyell 

 (iil 20) will be found excellently to object that the only 

 mammalia which are able to reach oceanic islands, 

 bats and seals, namely, ought to have been modified by 

 this time ; but Mr. Darwin, still more excellently per- 

 haps, answers, thus characteristically : " Seals wander 

 much no one species is confined to any island hence 

 wanderers would be apt to cross with individuals 

 undergoing any change and the same remark applies 

 even to bats ! " 



But the variation to Mr. Darwin is not only slight : 

 it is also casual, a matter of mere accident and chance, 

 spontaneously, independently present in the organism 

 itself. " Any slight modification which chances to arise 

 is selected" (ii. 176); "the formation of species I look 

 at as due to the selection of chance variations" (p. 87); 

 " no change till a variation chance to occur in the right 

 direction " (p. 337) ; " the action of selection on mere 

 accidental variability " (p. 369). These are all expres- 

 sions of Mr. Darwin's own (quoted more fully in the 

 Lectures). Nevertheless we do catch at times phrases 

 about "laws of variation." "No doubt;" Mr. Darwin 

 parenthetically observes (1856) to Hooker in the im- 

 portant passage (ii. 87), " the variability is governed by 

 laws, some of which I am endeavouring very obscurely 

 to trace ;" and (p. 125) he talks again of discussing these 

 laws. I do not know, however, that he has ever sig- 

 nalised any one law in the case, or that it was not his 

 cue just to leave it, as a matter of " chance" lawless. 

 At all events, he is free to acknowledge (p. 90) to 

 Hooker that, as the words are, " The cases discussed in 

 your last note are valuable to me (though odious and 



