12 LUCK, OR CUNNING? 



steamship as the amoeba to man, were to declare that 

 the Great Eastern engines were not designed at all, 

 on the ground that no one in the early kettle days 

 had foreseen so great a future development, and were 

 unable to understand that a piecemeal sohitur amhu- 

 lavdo design is more omnipresent, all-seeing, and all- 

 searching, and hence more truly in the strictest sense 

 design, than any speculative leap of fancy, however 

 bold and even at times successful. 



From Lamarck I went on to Buffon and Erasmus 

 Darwin — better men both of them than Lamarck, 

 and treated by him much as he has himself been 

 treated by those who have come after him— and 

 found that the system of these three writers, if con- 

 sidered rightly, and if the corollary that heredity 

 is only a mode of memory were added, would get 

 us out of our dilemma as regards descent and design, 

 and enable us to keep both. We could do this by 

 making the design manifested in orgaiusm more like 

 the only design of which we know anything and there- 

 fore the only design of which we ought to speak — I 

 mean our own. 



Our own design is tentative, and neither very far-fore- 

 seeing nor very retrospective ; it is a little of both, but 

 much of neither ; it is like a comet with a little light 

 in front of the nucleus and a good deal more behind it, 

 which ere long, however, fades away into the darkness ; 

 it is of a kind that, though a little wise before the 

 event, is apt to be much wiser after it, and to profit 

 even by mischance so long as the disaster is not an 

 overwhelming one ; nevertheless, though it is so inter- 



