The Question at Issue 95 
of the difficulty in which he found himself involved by his 
initial blunder of thinking he had got a distinctive feature 
which entitled him to claim the theory of evolution as an 
original idea of his own. He found his natural selection 
hang round his neck like a millstone. There is hardly a 
page in the ‘‘ Origin of Species ’”’ in which traces of the 
struggle going on in Mr. Darwin’s mind are not discernible, 
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 loopholes 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practice, has had clauses repealed up and down it till it is 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 contra- 
diction. 
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 arriére 
pensée as pervading it whenever the “ distinctive feature ig 
is on the fapis. It is right to say, however, that no such 
suspicion attaches to Mr. A. R. 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 improvement 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 to doubt his good 
