106 Luck, or Cunning ? 
survival in the struggle for existence of modifications which 
had been induced functionally, would not have hesitated 
to admit the survival of favourable variations due to mere 
accident as also a potent factor in inducing the results we 
see around us. 
For the rest, Mr. Spencer’s articles have relieved me from 
the necessity of going into the evidence which proves that 
such structures as a giraffe’s neck, for example, cannot 
possibly have been produced by the accumulation of varia- 
tions which had their origin mainly in accident. There is 
no occasion to add anything to what Mr. Spencer has said 
on this score, and I am satisfied that those who do not find 
his argument convince them would not be convinced by 
anything I might say ; I shall, therefore, omit what I had 
written on this subject, and confine myself to giving 
the substance of Mr. Spencer’s most telling argument 
against Mr. Darwin’s theory that accidental variations, 
if favourable, would accumulate and result in seemingly 
adaptive structures. Mr. Spencer well shows that luck or 
chance is insufficient as a motive-power, or helm, of evolu- 
tion ; but luck is only absence of design ; if, then, absence 
of design is found to fail, it follows that there must have 
been design somewhere, nor can the design be more con- 
veniently placed than in association with function. 
Mr. Spencer contends that where life is so simple as to 
consist practically in the discharge of only one function, 
or where circumstances are such that some one function is 
supremely important (a state of things, by the way, more 
easily found in hypothesis than in nature—at least as 
continuing without modification for many successive 
seasons), then accidental variations, if favourable, would 
indeed accumulate and result in modification, without the 
aid of the transmission of functionally produced modifica- 
tion. This is true ; it is also true, however, that only a very 
small number of species in comparison with those we see 
around us could thus arise, and that we should never have 
