104 LUCK, OR CUNNING ? 



the fact that with him accident, and not, as with Eras- 

 mus Darwin and Lamarck, sustained effort, is the main 

 .purveyor of the variations whose accumulation amounts 

 ultimately to specific difference. It is a pity, how- 

 ever, that instead of contenting himself like a theologian 

 with saying that his opponent had been refuted over 

 and over again, he did not refer to any particular and 

 tolerably successful attempt to refute the theory that 

 modifications in organic structure are mainly functional 

 I am fairly well accLuainted with the literature of 

 evolution, and have never met with any such attempt. 

 But let this . pass ; as with Mr. Darwin, so with Mr. 

 Wallace, and so indeed with all who accept Mr. 

 Charles Darwin's natural selection as the. main means 

 of modification, the central idea is luck, while the cen- 

 tral idea of the Erasmus-Darwinian system is cunning. 

 I have given the opinions of these contending 

 parties in their extreme development ; but they both 

 admit abatements which bring them somewhat nearer 

 to one another. Design, as even its most strenuous 

 upholders will admit, is a difficult word to deal with ; 

 it is, like all our ideas, substantial enough until we try 

 to grasp it — and then, like all our ideas, it mockingly 

 eludes us ; it is like life or death — a rope of many 

 strands ; there is design within design, and design within 

 undesign ; there is undesign within design (as when a 

 man shuffles cards designing that there shall be no design 

 in their arrangement), and undesign within undesign ; 

 when we speak of cunning or design in connection 

 with organism we do not mean cunning, all cunning, 

 and nothing but cunning, so that there shall be no 



