II.] INCIPIENT STRUCTURES. 67 



greater chance of being killed ; but then, they can better 

 afford to be killed. The grain will only turn the scales 

 when these are very nicely balanced, and an advantage 

 in numbers counts for weight, even as an advantage 

 in structure. As the numbers of the favoured variety 

 diminish, so must its relative advantages increase, if the 

 chance of its existence is to surpass the chance of its ex- 

 tinction, until hardly any conceivable advantage would 

 enable the descendants of a single pair to exterminate the 

 descendants of many thousands if they and their descen- 

 dants are supposed to breed freely with the inferior variety, 

 and so gradually lose their ascendency." 



Mr. Darwin himself says of the article quoted : " The 

 justice of these remarks cannot, I think, be disputed. If, 

 for instance, a bird of some kind could procure its food 

 more easily by having its beak curved, and if one were 

 born with its beak strongly curved, and which consequently 

 flourished, nevertheless there would be a very poor chance 

 of this one individual perpetuating its kind to the exclusion 

 of the common form ; but there can hardly be a doubt, 

 judging by what we see taking place under domestication, 

 that this result would follow from the preservation during 

 many generations of a large number of individuals with 

 more or less curved beaks, and from the destruction of a 

 still larger number with the straightest beaks." This 

 admission appears to the author to be of compromising 

 significance. 1 



i Mr. Darwin, in his recent work on Man, makes the further remarkable 

 admission : " I now admit . . . that in the earlier editions of my ' Origin 

 of Species' I probably attributed too much to the action of Natural Selec- 

 tion, or the survival of the fittest. ... I had not formerly sufficiently 

 considered the existence of many structures which appear to be, as far as 



F 2 



