Essays on Life 



Wallace, as is well known, brought the feature 

 forward simultaneously and independently of 

 one another, but Mr. Wallace always believed 

 in it more firmly than Mr. Darwin did. Mr. 

 Darwin as a young man did not believe in it. 

 He wrote before 1839, " Nature, by making 

 habit omnipotent and its effects hereditary, 

 has fitted the Fuegian for the climate and 

 productions of his country," l a sentence than 

 which nothing can coincide more fully with 

 the older view that use and disuse were the 

 main purveyors of variations, or conflict more 

 fatally with his own subsequent distinctive 

 feature. Moreover, as I showed in my last 

 work on evolution, 2 in the peroration to his 

 " Origin of Species," he discarded his acci- 

 dental variations altogether, and fell back on 

 the older theory, so that the body of the 

 " Origin of Species " supports one theory, and 

 the peroration another that differs from it 

 toto coelo. Finally, in his later editions, he 

 retreated indefinitely from his original posi- 



1 "Voyages of the Adventure and Beagle," iii. p. 237. 



2 ' ' Luck, or Cunning, as the main means of Organic Modi- 

 fication?" (Longmans), pp. 179, 180. 



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