reader will doubtless see them, and will also doubtless see that in
spite of them there can be no doubt that Lamarck, while believing
modification to be effected mainly by the survival in the struggle
for existence of modifications which had been induced functionally,
would not have hesitated to admit the survival of favourable
variations due to mere accident as also a potent factor in inducing
the results we see around us.

For the rest, Mr. Spencer's articles have relieved me from the
necessity of going into the evidence which proves that such
structures as a giraffe's neck, for example, cannot possibly have
been produced by the accumulation of variations which had their
origin mainly in accident. There is no occasion to add anything to
what Mr. Spencer has said on this score, and I am satisfied that
those who do not find his argument convince them would not be
convinced by anything I might say; I shall, therefore, omit what I
had written on this subject, and confine myself to giving the
substance of Mr. Spencer's most telling argument against Mr.
Darwin's theory that accidental variations, if favourable, would
accumulate and result in seemingly adaptive structures. Mr. Spencer
well shows that luck or chance is insufficient as a motive-power, or
helm, of evolution; but luck is only absence of design; if, then,
absence of design is found to fail, it follows that there must have
been design somewhere, nor can the design be more conveniently
placed than in association with function.

Mr. Spencer contends that where life is so simple as to consist
practically in the discharge of only one function, or where
circumstances are such that some one function is supremely important
(a state of things, by the way, more easily found in hypothesis than