236 DARWIN. 



to progression,' ' adaptations from the slow willing of animals,' 

 etc. ! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different 

 from his ; though the means of change are wholly so." In another 

 place he wrote : " Lamarck's work appeared to me to be extremely 

 poor ; I got not a fact or idea from it." 



By 1856, Darwin had sent Hooker his manu- 

 scripts. He had also, as a matter of greatest in- 

 terest to us in the development of his views, swung 

 entirely away from any sympathy with the theories 

 of BufTon and Lamarck, and had reached the ex- 

 treme position as to the powers of Natural Selection 

 which he continued to hold for some years. Several 

 passages show this : 



"... External conditions (to which naturalists so often appeal) 

 do, by themselves, very little. How much they do, is the point, 

 of all others, on which I feel myself very weak. I judge from 

 the facts of variation under domestication, and I may yet get 

 more light. . . . The formation of a strong variety or species I 

 look at as almost wholly due to the selection of what may be 

 incorrectly called 'chance fl variations, or variability." As to the 

 powers of Natural Selection, he wrote to Lyell, in 1859 : " Grant a 

 simple archetypal creature, like the Mud-fish or Lepidosiren, with 

 the five senses and some vestige of mind, and I believe Natural 

 Selection will account for the production of every vertebrate animal" 



He was more cautious in publication, for in the 

 first edition of the Origin of Species, which appeared 

 in the same year, he said : " I am convinced that 

 Natural Selection has been the main, but not the 

 exclusive, means of modification." 



In the use of ' chance,' Darwin recalls to mind the 



1 His meaning in the use of the word * chance ' was not the ordinary one. 

 See 6th edition of the Origin, p. 121 : "I have sometimes spoken," etc. 



