INTRODUCTION. 5 



* 

 intelligible, if the contentions of " Life and Habit " 

 were admitted. 



Before I had finished writing this book I fell in 

 with Professor Mivart's " Genesis of Species," and for 

 the first time understood the distinction between the 

 Lamarckian and Charles-Darwinian systems of evolu- 

 tion. This had not, so far as I then knew, been as 

 yet made clear to us by any of our more prominent 

 writer's upon the subject of descent with modification ; 

 the distinction was unknown to the general public, 

 and indeed is only now beginning to be widely under- 

 stood. While reading Mr. Mivart's book, however, I 

 became aware that I was being faced by two facts, 

 each incontrovertible, but each, if its leading exponents 

 were to be trusted, incompatible with the other. 



On the one hand there was descent; we could not 

 read Mr. Darwin's books and doubt that all, both 

 animals and plants, were descended from a common 

 source. On the other, there was design; we could 

 not read Paley and refuse to admit that design, intelli- 

 gence, adaptation of means to ends, must have had a 

 large share in the development of the life we saw 

 around us ; it seemed indisputable that the minds and 

 bodies of all living beings must have come to be what 

 they are though a wise ordering and administering of 

 their estates. We could not, therefore, dispense either 

 with descent or with design, and yet it seemed impos- 

 sible to keep both, for those who offered us descent stuck 

 to it that we could have no design, and those, again, 

 who spoke so wisely and so well about design would 

 not for a moment hear of descent with modification. 



