The Question at Issue 97 
the theory that modifications in organic structure are 
mainly functional. I am fairly well acquainted 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 modifica- 
tion, the central idea is luck, while the central 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 
place for luck ; we do not mean that conscious attention 
and forethought shall have been bestowed upon the 
minutest details of action, and nothing been left to work 
itself out departmentally according to precedent, or as it 
otherwise best may according to the chapter of accidents. 
So, again, when Mr. Darwin and his followers deny 
design and effort to have been the main purveyors of the 
variations whose accumulation results in specific difference, 
they do not entirely exclude the action of use and disuse— 
and this at once opens the door for cunning ; nevertheless, 
according to Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, the human 
eye and the long neck of the giraffe are alike due to the 
accumulation of variations that are mainly functional, 
and hence practical; according to Charles Darwin they 
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