166 Luck, or Cunning ? 
or so thus covered exactly as his grandfather and Lamarck 
had done, and indeed as all sensible people since Buffon 
wrote have done if they have accepted evolution at all. 
Then why should he not have said so? What object 
could he have in writing an elaborate work to support a 
theory which he knew all the time to be untenable? The 
impropriety of such a course, unless the work was, like 
Buffon’s, transparently ironical, could only be matched 
by its fatuousness, or indeed by the folly of one who should 
assign action so motiveless to any one out of a lunatic 
asylum. 
This sounds well, but unfortunately we cannot forget 
that when Mr. Darwin wrote the “ Origin of Species” 
he claimed to be the originator of the theory of descent 
with modification generally ; that he did this without one 
word of reference either to Buffon or Erasmus Darwin until 
the first six thousand copies of his book had been sold, 
and then with as meagre, inadequate notice as can be well 
coriceived. Lamarck was just named in the first editions 
of the “ Origin of Species,” but only to be told that Mr. 
Darwin had not got anything to give him, and he must go 
away ; the author of the “‘ Vestiges of Creation ”’ was also 
just mentioned, but only in a sentence full of such gross 
misrepresentation that Mr. Darwin did not venture to 
stand by it, and expunged it in later editions, as usual, 
without calling attention to what he had done. It would 
have been in the highest degree imprudent, not to say 
impossible, for one so conscientious as Mr. Darwin to have 
taken the line he took in respect of descent with modifica- 
tion generally, if he were not provided with some ostensibly 
distinctive feature, in virtue of which, if people said any- 
thing, he might claim to have advanced something dif- 
ferent, and widely different, from the theory of evolution 
propounded by his illustrious predecessors ; a distinctive 
theory of some sort, therefore, had got to be looked for— 
and if people look in this spirit they can generally find. 
