738 An Exegesis of Darwinism. [December, 
while probably the commonest mode of aCtion is upon suc- 
cessive generations (“ two, three, or more,” ii., 258) ; 
“ changed conditions requiring a long time for their cumu- 
lative aCtion ” (ii., 39, &c.), it is “ more especially its ances- 
tors ” who are influenced (ii., 241). 
There is “ some probability in the view propounded by 
Andrew Knight, that this variability may be partly con- 
nected with excess of food (p. 5). “ Of all the causes which 
induce variability, excess of food, whether or not changed 
in nature, is probably the most important ” (ii., 244). 
I apprehend that — whatever may have determined the 
site of Mr. Darwin’s TOMB — a recognition of the service 
rendered to Science by the promulgation of this theory, that 
from one to at most ten pre-Cambrian, presumably unicel- 
lular, organisms, created and vivified by the Creator’s breath, 
have arisen without any subsequent interference, and we 
can hardly believe otherwise than without beneficent guid- 
ance, the structures and the bodily and mental activities of 
all organisms, by the accumulation, mainly by natural se- 
lection, of variations so minute as to be appreciable only to 
well-trained eyes, occurring in correlation but not in co- 
ordination with related variations, affeCting single indivi- 
duals, inducing intermittent modification, and being 
determined in their nature by an innate idiosyncratic plas- 
ticity, the chief ultimate cause of which is probably the 
accumulating aCtion of changing conditions upon the parents, 
but more especially remoter ancestors, of the varying indi- 
vidual, — contributes to place his STATUE in the British 
Museum (Natural History) ; and that should any character- 
isation of this theory and its advocacy by its author and 
his adherents with justice assimilate, or even approximate, 
in severity such remarks as may be fitly made concerning 
the Bacon and Leibnitz quotations, the promoters of the 
memorial may some day be ashamed. 
