with nature," {104a} and clearly does not contemplate function as
the sole cause of modification. Practically, though I grant I
should be less able to quote passages in support of my opinion than
I quite like, I do not doubt that his position was much the same as
that of his successors, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck.

Lamarck is more vulnerable than either Erasmus Darwin or Buffon on
the score of unwillingness to assign its full share to mere chance,
but I do not for a moment believe his comparative reticence to have
been caused by failure to see that the chapter of accidents is a
fateful one. He saw that the cunning or functional side had been
too much lost sight of, and therefore insisted on it, but he did not
mean to say that there is no such thing as luck. "Let us suppose,"
he says, "that a grass growing in a low-lying meadow, gets carried
BY SOME ACCIDENT to the brow of a neighbouring hill, where the soil
is still damp enough for the plant to be able to exist." {105a} Or
again--"With sufficient time, favourable conditions of life,
successive changes in the condition of the globe, and the power of
new surroundings and habits to modify the organs of living bodies,
all animal and vegetable forms have been imperceptibly rendered such
as we now see them." {105b} Who can doubt that accident is here
regarded as a potent factor of evolution, as well as the design that
is involved in the supposition that modification is, in the main,
functionally induced? Again he writes, "As regards the
circumstances that give rise to variation, the principal are
climatic changes, different temperatures of any of a creature's
environments, differences of abode, of habit, of the most frequent
actions, and lastly of the means of obtaining food, self-defence,
reproduction," &c. {105c} I will not dwell on the small
inconsistencies which may be found in the passages quoted above; the