Z36 DARWIN. 



to progression,' ' adaptations from the slow willing of animals,' 

 etc. ! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different 

 from his ; though the means of change are wholly so." In another 

 place he wrote : *' Lamarck's work appeared to me to be extremely 

 poor; I got not a fact or idea from it." 



By 1856, Darwin had sent Hooker his manu- 

 scripts. He had also, as a matter of greatest in- 

 terest to us in the development of his views, swung 

 entirely away from any sympathy with the theories 

 of Buffon and Lamarck, and had reached the ex- 

 treme position as to the powers of Natural Selection 

 which he continued to hold for some years. Several 

 passages show this : — 



"... External conditions (to which naturalists so often appeal) 

 do, by themselves, very little. How much they do, is the point, 

 of all others, on which I feel myself very weak. I judge from 

 the facts of variation under domestication, and I may yet get 

 more light. . . . The formation of a strong variety or species I 

 look at as almost wholly due to the selection of what may be 

 incorrectly called ^chance '^ variations, or variability." As to the 

 powers of Natural Selection, he wrote to Lyell, in 1859 : " Grant a 

 simple archetypal creature, like the Mud-fish or Lepidosiren, with 

 the five senses and some vestige of mind, and / believe Natural 

 Selection will account for the productio7i of every vertebrate animal.^'' 



He was more cautious In publication, for In the 

 first edition of the Origin of Species, which appeared 

 in the same year, he said : " I am convinced that 

 Natural Selection has been the main, but not the 

 exclusive, means of modification." 



In the use of ' chance,' Darwin recalls to mind the 



^ His meaning in the use of the word * chance ' was not the ordinary one. 

 See 6th edition of the Origin, p. 121 : "I have sometimes spoken," etc. 



