DARWIN'S VARIATIONS. 189 



of academicism ; I know how instinctively academicism 

 everywhere must range itself on Mr. Darwin's side, and 

 how askance it must look on those who write as I do ; 

 but I know also that there is a power before which 

 even academicism must bow, and to this power I look 

 not unhopefully for support. 



As regards Mr. Spencer's contention that Mr. 

 Darwin leaned more towards function as he grew older, 

 I do not doubt that at the end of his life Mr. Darwin 

 believed modification to be mainly due to function, 

 but the passage quoted on page 62 written in 1839, 

 coupled with the concluding paragraph of the " Origin 

 of Species" written in 1859, and allowed to stand 

 during seventeen years of revision, though so much 

 else was altered — these passages, when their dates and 

 surroundings are considered, suggest strongly that 

 Mr. Darwin thought during all the forty years or so 

 thus covered exactly as his grandfather and Lamarck 

 had done, and indeed as all sensible people since 

 Buffon wrote have done if they have accepted evolu- 

 tion at all. 



Then why should he not have said so ? What 

 object could he have in writing an elaborate work to 

 support a theory which he knew all the time to be 

 untenable ? The impropriety of such a course, unless 

 the work was, like Buffon's, transparently ironical, could 

 only be matched by its fatuousness, or indeed by the 

 folly of one who should assign action so motiveless to 

 any one out of a lunatic asylum. 



This sounds well, but unfortunately we cannot forget 

 that when Mr. Darwin wrote the " Origin of Species " 



