ESTIMATES OF BIS CHARACTER AND WORK 



73 



remembering when it was written, I felt I had done 

 him injustice. 



" Even as to man's gradual acquisition of more and 

 more ideas, and then of speech slowly as the ideas 

 multiplied, and then his persecution of the beings 

 most nearly allied and competing with him — all this 

 is very Darwinian. 



" The substitution of the variety-making power for 

 'volition,' 'muscular action,' etc. (and in plants even 

 volition was not called in), is in some respects only 

 a change of names. Call a new variety a new crea- 

 tion, one may say of the former, as of the latter, what 

 you say when you observe that the creationist explains 

 nothing, and only affirms ' it is so because it is so.' 



" Lamarck's belief in the slow changes in the or- 

 ganic and inorganic world in the year 1800 was surely 

 above the standard of his times, and he was right 

 about progression in the main, though you have 

 vastly advanced that doctrine. As to Owen in his 

 ' Aye Aye ' paper, he seems to me a disciple of Pou- 

 chet, who converted him at Rouen to ' spontaneous 

 generation.' 



" Have I not, at p. 412, put the vast distinction be- 

 tween you and Lamarck as to ' necessary progres- 

 sion ' strongly enough ?" (To Darwin, March 15, 1863. 

 Ly ell's Letters, ii., p. 365.) 



Darwin, in the freedom of private correspondence, 

 paid scant respect to the views of his renowned pre- 

 decessor, as the following extracts from his published 

 letters will show : 



" Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of 

 a ' tendency 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." (Darwin's Life 

 and Letters, ii., p. 23, 1844.) 



