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Notices of Books . 
I July, 
will at once appear if we rejeCt the words “ Natural Selection,” 
and write in their stead the expression “ Survival of the Fittest,” 
which Mr. Darwin himself declares to be equivalent in meaning. 
Everyone will then admit that before the fittest can survive it 
must come into existence. Here Mr. Darwin leaves us in the 
dark, giving us an “ Origin of Species ” with the “ Origin ” cut 
out. But this is not all : the bulk of the readers of Mr. Darwin’s 
work go away with the impression that Natural Selection is the 
most important cause of modification. Now Mr. Darwin cer- 
tainly protests against being understood to assert that Natural 
Selection induces variability, and yet, perhaps from inadvertence, 
uses language open to a very different interpretation. Thus he 
declares Natural Selection the most important “ means ” of mo- 
dification. Here Mr. Butler remarks — “ ‘ Means’ is a dangerous 
word ; it slips too easily into cause. We have seen Mr. Darwin 
himself say that Buffon did not enter on ‘ the causes or means ’ 
of modification, as though the two words were synonymous or 
nearly so. The use of the word ‘ means ’ enables Mr. Darwin to 
speak of Natural Selection as if it were an aCtive cause (which 
he constantly does), and yet to avoid expressly maintaining that 
it is a cause of modification.” 
It will now be asked, what does Mr. Butler offer us instead of 
Natural Selection as a more satisfactory solution of the mutation 
of forms and the rise of species. Taking up the views of Lamarck 
and of the elder Darwin, he contends that “ differentiations of 
structure and instindt are due to the desires under changing cir- 
cumstances of an organism, which must be regarded as a single 
creature, though its development has extended over millions of 
years.” 
Between parents and offspring there is oneness of personality 
— a view which explains the phenomena of heredity and of in- 
stinCt, or, as it might be called, unconscious memory. Purpose 
and intelligence are thus brought into play in the genesis of spe- 
cies, but the intelligence is not that of an Allwise Creator, which 
cannot be supposed as taking tentative steps, or abandoning its 
plans as unsatisfactory and working in a different direction. 
With reference to the nidification of birds, we find a case 
quoted from Miss Seward’s biography of Erasmus Darwin which 
supplies the crucial experiment asked for by Mr. Wallace in his 
Essay on the “ Philosophy of Birds’ Nests.”* A pair of young 
canaries, who had never seen a nest built, are described as con- 
structing their nest on the slovenly regulation pattern of their 
race, “even to the precise disposal of every hair and shred of 
wool.” For such a faCt Mr. Butler’s theory accounts without the 
invocation of a mysterious “ instinCt.” 
Into the biographies of Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, 
and into the author’s exposition of their views, space does not 
allow us to enter. We can only quote two passages, very different 
* Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, p. 21 1. 
