160 Luck, or Cunning ? 
allowed this paragraph to remain from first. to last un- 
changed (except for the introduction of the words “ by. 
the Creator,’ which are wanting in the first edition) if 
they did not convey the conception he most wished his 
readers to retain. Even if in his first edition he had failed to 
see that he was abandoning in his last paragraph all that it 
had been his ostensible object most especially to support in 
the body of his book, he must have become aware of it long 
before he revised the “Origin of Species” for the last time; 
still he never altered it, and never put us on our guard. 
It was not Mr. Darwin’s manner to put his reader on 
his guard ; we might as well expect Mr. Gladstone to put 
us on our guard about the Irish land bills. Caveat lector 
seems to have been his motto. Mr. Spencer, in the articles 
already referred to, is at pains to show that Mr. Darwin’s 
opinions in later life underwent a change in the direction 
of laying greater stress on functionally produced modifica- 
tions, and points out that in the sixth edition of the “ Origin 
of Species’ Mr. Darwin says, ‘‘I think there can be no 
doubt that use in our domestic animals has strengthened 
and enlarged certain parts, and disuse diminished them ; ” 
whereas in his first edition he said, ‘‘ I think there can be 
little doubt” of this. Mr. Spencer also quotes a passage 
from ‘‘ The Descent of Man,” in which Mr. Darwin said 
that even in. the first edition of the ‘‘ Origin of Species ” he 
had attributed great effect to function, as though in the 
later ones he had attributed still more; but if there was: 
any considerable change of position, it should not have been 
left to be toilsomely collected by collation of editions, and 
comparison of passages far removed from one another in 
other books. If his mind had undergone the modification 
supposed by Mr. Spencer, Mr. Darwin should have said so 
in a prominent passage of some later edition of the “ Origin. 
of Species.’’ He should have said— In my earlier editions 
I underrated, as now seems probable, the effects of use and 
disuse as purveyors of the slight successive modifications 
