DARWIN 



337 



ory of adaptation and Lamarck's inheritance 

 theory of adaptation is shown in the following 

 passages : 



The giraffe lives in dry, des- 

 ert places, without herbage, so 

 that it is obliged to browse on 

 the leaves of trees, and is con- 

 tinually forced to reach up to 

 them. It results from this habit, 

 continued for a long time in all 

 the individuals of its species, 

 that its fore limbs have become 

 so elongated that the giraffe, 

 without raising itself erect on 

 its hind legs, raises its head 

 and reaches six metres high 

 (almost twenty feet). — La- 

 marck: Philosophie Zoologique, 

 1809, vol. I, p. 256, See Pack- 

 ard's Lamarck, His Life and 

 Worky 1901, p. 351. 



So under nature with the 

 nascent giraffe, the individuals 

 which were the highest brows- 

 ers, and were able during 

 dearths to reach even an inch 

 or two above the others, will 

 often have been preserved; for 

 they will have roamed over the 

 whole country in search of 

 food. . . . Slight proportional 

 differences, due to the laws of 

 growth and variation, are not 

 of the slightest use or impor- 

 tance to most species. But it 

 will have been otherwise with 

 the nascent giraffe, considering 

 its probable habits of life; for 

 those individuals which had 

 some one part or several parts 

 of their bodies rather more 

 elongated than usual, would 

 generally have survived. These 

 will have intercrossed and left 

 offspring, either inheriting the 

 same bodily peculiarities, or 

 with a tendency to vary again 

 in the same manner; whilst the 

 individuals, less favoured in the 

 same respects, will have been 

 the most liable to perish. — Dar- 

 win: Origin of Species. Last 

 edition, authorized edition, No. 

 604, 1896, vol. I, p. 277. 



In the use of the word 'chance,'^ Darwin re- 

 calls to mind the old passage in Aristotle of the 

 two alternatives in our views of Nature. Dar- 



^His meaning in the use of the word *chance' was not the ordi- 

 nary one. Loc. cit., p. 164: "I have sometimes spoken," etc. 



