Professor Lankester and Lamarck 229 
Ray Lankester has taken to understand Lamarck, and by 
this time know them sufficiently. We thankfully accept 
by far the greater number, and rely on them as our sheet- 
anchors to save us from drifting on to the quicksands of 
Neo-Darwinian natural selection; few of them, indeed, 
are Mr. Darwin’s, except in so far as he has endorsed them 
and given them publicity, but I do not know that this 
detracts from their value. We have paid great attention 
to Mr. Darwin’s facts, and if we do not understand all his 
arguments—for it is not always given to mortal man to 
understand these—yet we think we know what he was 
driving at. We believe we understand this to the full as 
well as Mr. Darwin intended us to do, and perhaps better. 
Where the arguments tend to show that all animals and 
plants are descended from a common source we find them 
much the same as Buffon’s, or as those of Erasmus Darwin 
or Lamarck, and have nothing to say against them ; where, 
on the other hand, they aim at proving that the main means 
of modification has been the fact that if an animal has been 
“‘ favoured ” it will be “‘ preserved ’—then we think that 
the animal’s own exertions will, in the long run, have had 
more to do with its preservation than any real or fancied 
“favour.” Professor Ray Lankester continues :— 
“The doctrine of evolution has become an accepted 
truth” (Professor Ray Lankester writes as though the 
making of truth and falsehood lay in the hollow of Mr. 
Darwin’s hand. Surely ‘‘ has become accepted” should 
be enough ; Mr. Darwin did not make the doctrine true) 
“entirely in consequence of Mr. Darwin’s having demon- 
strated the mechanism ”’ (There is no mechanism in the 
matter, and if there is, Mr. Darwin did not show it. He 
made some words which confused us and prevented us 
from seeing that “the preservation of favoured races ”’ 
was a cloak for ‘‘ luck,” and that this was all the explana- 
tion he was giving) ‘“‘ by which the evolution is possible ; it 
was almost universally rejected, while such undemonstrable 
