64 Luck, or Cunning ? 
ways, and pat design as it were on the head while not com- 
mitting himself to any proposition which could be disputed. 
The explanation is sufficiently obvious. Mr Darwin 
wanted to hedge. He saw that the design which his works 
had been mainly instrumental in pitchforking out of 
organisms no less manifestly designed than a burglar’s 
jemmy is designed, had nevertheless found its way back 
again, and that though, as I insisted in “‘ Evolution Old 
and New,” and “‘ Unconscious Memory,” it must now be 
placed within the organism instead of outside it, as “ was 
formerly the case,” it was not on that account any the 
less——design, as well as interesting. 
I should like to have seen Mr. Darwin say this more 
explicitly. Indeed I should have liked to have seen Mr. 
Darwin say anything at all about the meaning of which 
there could be no mistake, and without contradicting him- 
self elsewhere; but this was not Mr. Darwin’s manner. 
In passing I will give another example of Mr Darwin’s 
manner when he did not quite dare even to hedge. It is to 
be found in the preface which he wrote to Professor 
Weismann’s “ Studies in the Theory of Descent,” pub- 
lished in 1882. 
“‘ Several distinguished naturalists,” says Mr. Darwin, 
“ maintain with much confidence that organic beings tend 
to vary and to rise in the scale, independently of the con- 
ditions to which they and their progenitors have been 
exposed ; whilst others maintain that all variation is due 
to such exposure, though the manner in which the environ- 
ment acts is as yet quite unknown. At the present time 
there is hardly any question in biology of more importance 
than this of the nature and causes of variability; and the 
reader will find in the present work an able discussion on 
the whole subject, which will probably lead him to pause 
before he admits the existence of an innate tendency 
to perfectibility ’—or towards being able io be perfected. 
I could find no able discussion upon the whole subject 
a” 
