118 SPECIES. 



disposed to admit but one primordial type for all organic 

 nature.* 



Darwin, however, seems to us to have fallen into a grievous 

 exaggeration, or error of interpretation, formerly laid to La- 

 marck's charge, while he is at the same time defending an 

 excellent cause. Without speaking here of the relationship 

 (forced, in our opinion) which Darwin makes out between wild 

 and domestic animals (of which we have before spoken), the 

 learned Englishman seems to have accorded too much to indi- 

 vidual action in the production of specific modification. He 

 sees a powerful activity, which he calls natural selection, where 

 we can only see absolute passiveness. We will explain what 

 we mean : in the midst of this vital concurrence, which he has 

 in part so well described, in the midst of this immense 

 struggle, where all which has life on our planet is engaged in 

 combat one against the other, or against all, on this eternal 

 field of battle, where the victors become the victims, Darwin 

 supposes that an animal brings into the world with him, by 

 chance, some psychological modification, or some anatomical 

 disposition, which is individually advantageous to him in the 

 great struggle for life ; after this he will have a chance of 

 being among the victors, of uniting himself to another animal 

 as happily endowed by birth by having also conquered ; they 

 will together leave a numerous posterity, and there is every 

 chance that some of the descendants of such a couple may 

 inherit either the same instinctive disposition or the same con- 

 formation; definitively, and by the repeated action of this 

 natural proceeding, a new variety can be formed, and may 

 either supplant the parent species or coexist with it.f 



Such is, in a few words, the theoiy of natural selection. In 

 our ideas, there is here a false interpretation of facts ; we do 

 not believe in this chance of a native disposition, which thus 

 transmits itself in order to become in time a specific charac- 



* Darwin On the Origin of Species, p. 518, London, 1861. " I believe that 

 animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants 

 from an equal or less number. Analogy would lead me one step farther, 

 namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some 

 one prototype." 



f Compare Darwin On the Origin of Species, p. 96, 1861. 



