I02 LUCK, OR CUNNING? 



cernible, with a result alike exasperating and pitiable. 

 I can only repeat what I said in " Evolution Old and 

 New," namely, that I find the task of extracting a well- 

 defined meaning out of Mr. Darwin's words comparable 

 only to that of trying to act on the advice of a lawyer 

 who has obscured the main issue as much as he can, 

 and whose chief aim has been to leave as many loop- 

 holes as possible for himself to escape by, if things 

 should go wrong hereafter. Or, again, to that of one 

 who has to construe an Act of Parliament which was 

 originally drawn with a view to throwing as much 

 dust as possible in the eyes of those who would oppose 

 the measure, and which, having been found utterly 

 unworkable in practice, has had clauses repealed up 

 and down it till it is now in an inextricable tangle of 

 confusion and contradiction. 



{ The more Mr. Darwin's work is studied, and more 

 especially the more his different editions are compared, 

 the more impossible is it to avoid a suspicion of 

 arriere pensde as pervading it whenever the "dis- 

 tinctive feature " is on the tajpis. It is right to say, 

 however, that no such suspicion attaches to Mr. A. E. 

 Wallace, Mr. Darwin's fellow discoverer of natural 

 selection. It is impossible to doubt that Mr. Wallace 

 believed he had made a real and important improve- 

 ment upon the Lamarckian system, and, as a natural 

 consequence, unlike Mr. Darwin, he began by telling 

 ■us what Lamarck had said. He did not, I admit, say 

 quite all that I should have been glad to have seen 

 him say, nor use exactly the words I should myself 

 have chosen, but he said enough to make it impossible 



