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, sw^ung 

 entirely away from any sympathy with the theories 

 of Buffon and Lamarck, and had reached the ex- 

 treme position as to the pow-ers 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 " variations, or variability." .\s 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 / believe Natural 

 Selection will account for the production 0/ every vertebrate animal." 



He was more cautious in publication, for in the 

 ... rft-*. 

 first edition of the Origin of Spccicsr^\\v\Q!h 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 



' 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. 



