Darwin’s Variations 161 
whose accumulation in the ordinary course of things results 
in specific difference, and I laid too much stress on the 
accumulation of merely accidental variations ; ” having 
said this, he should have summarised the reasons that had 
made him change his mind, and given a list of the most 
important cases in which he has seen fit to alter what he had 
originally written. If Mr. Darwin had dealt thus with us 
we should have readily condoned all the mistakes he would 
have been at all likely to have made, for we should have 
known him as one who was trying to help us, tidy us up, 
keep us straight, and enable us to use our judgments to the 
best advantage. The public will forgive many errors alike 
of taste and judgment, where it feels that a writer per- 
sistently desires this. 
I can only remember a couple of sentences in the later 
editions of the “ Origin of Species” in which Mr. Darwin 
directly admits a change of opinion as regards the main 
causes of organic modification. How shuffling the first of 
these is I have already shown in “ Life and Habit,” p. 260, 
and in “ Evolution, Old and New,” p. 359; I need not, 
therefore, say more here, especially as there has been no 
rejoinder to what I then said. Curiously enough the sentence 
does not bear out Mr. Spencer’s contention that Mr. Darwin 
in his later years leaned more decidedly towards functionally 
produced modifications, for it runs :*—‘‘In the earlier 
editions of this work I underrated, as now seems probable, 
the frequency and importance of modifications due,” not, 
as Mr. Spencer would have us believe, to use and disuse, 
but ‘‘ to spontaneous variability,” by which can only be 
intended, “ to variations in no way connected with use and 
disuse,” as not being assignable to any known cause of 
general application, and referable as far as we are concerned 
to accident only ; so that he gives the natural survival of 
the luckiest, which is indeed his distinctive feature, if it 
deserve to be called a feature at all, greater prominence 
* “ Origin of Species,’”’ ed. vi., 1876, p. 171. 
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