The Question at Issue 85 
organisms whose variations arise mainly through use and 
disuse ? In other words, from variations that are mainly 
functional? Or from among organisms whose variations 
are in the main matters of luck? From variations into 
which a moral and intellectual system of payment according 
to results has largely entered ? Or from variations which 
have been thrown for with dice ? From variations among 
which, though cards tell, yet play tells as much or more ? 
Or from those in which cards are everything and play goes 
for so little as to be not worth taking into account ? Is 
“ the survival of the fittest ” to be taken as meaning “ the 
survival of the luckiest ” or “ the survival of those who 
know best how to turn fortune to account”? Is luck the 
only element of fitness, or is not cunning even more indis- 
pensable ? 
Mr. Darwin has a habit, borrowed, perhaps, mutatis 
mutandis, from the framers of our collects, of every now and 
then adding the words ‘‘ through natural selection,” as 
though this squared everything, and descent with modifica- 
tion thus became his theory at once. This is not the case. 
Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck believed in natural 
selection to the full as much as any follower of Mr. Charles 
Darwin can do. They did not use the actual words, but the 
idea underlying them is the essence of their system. Mr. 
Patrick Matthew epitomised their doctrine more tersely, 
perhaps, than was done by any other of the pre-Charles- 
Darwinian evolutionists, in the following passage which 
appeared in 1831, and which I have already quoted in 
“Evolution Old and New ” (pp. 320, 323). The passage 
runs :— 
“ The self-regulating adaptive disposition of organised 
life may, in part, be traced to the extreme fecundity of 
nature, who, as before stated, has in all the varieties of her 
offspring a prolific power much beyond (in many cases a 
thousandfold) what is necessary to fill up the vacancies 
caused by senile decay. As the field of existence is limited 
