“Factors of Organic Evolution” 105 
should be less able to quote passages in support of my 
opinion than I quite like, I do not doubt that his position 
was much the same as that of his successors, Erasmus 
Darwin and Lamarck. 
Lamarck is more vulnerable than either Erasmus 
Darwin or Buffon on the score of unwillingness to assign 
its full share to mere chance, but I do not for a moment 
believe his comparative reticence to have been caused by 
failure to see that the chapter of accidents is a fateful one. 
He saw that the cunning or functional side had been too 
much lost sight of, and therefore insisted on it, but he 
did not mean to say that there is no such thing as luck. 
“Let us suppose,” he says, “ that a grass growing in a 
low-lying meadow, gets carried by some accident to the brow 
of a neighbouring hill, where the soil is still damp enough 
for the plant to be able to exist.”* Or again—“‘ With 
sufficient time, favourable conditions of life, successive 
changes in the condition of the globe, and the power of new 
surroundings and habits to modify the organs of living 
bodies, all animal and vegetable forms have been impercep- 
tibly rendered such as we now see them.”’+ Who can doubt 
that accident is here regarded as a potent factor of evolu- 
tion, as well as the design that is involved in the supposition 
that modification is, in the main, functionally induced ? 
Again he writes, ‘‘ As regards the circumstances that give 
rise to variation, the principal are climatic changes, different 
temperatures of any of a creature’s environments, differ- 
ences of abode, of habit, of the most frequent actions, and 
lastly of the means of obtaining food, self-defence, reproduc- 
tion,” &c.t I will not dwell on the small inconsistencies 
which may be found in the passages quoted above ; the 
reader will doubtless see them, and will also doubtless see 
that in spite of them there can be no doubt that Lamarck, 
while believing modification to be effected mainly by the 
* “ Phil, Zool.,” i., p. 80. ¢ Ibid., i. 82. 
t Ibid. vol.i., p. 237. 
