inexorable "Thus far shalt thou go and no farther" barred them from
fruition of the harvest they should have been the first to reap.
The very men who most insisted that specific difference was the
accumulation of differences so minute as to be often hardly, if at
all, perceptible, could not see that the striking and baffling
phenomena of design in connection with organism admitted of exactly
the same solution as the riddle of organic development, and should
be seen not as a result reached per saltum, but as an accumulation
of small steps or leaps in a given direction. It was as though
those who had insisted on the derivation of all forms of the steam-
engine from the common kettle, and who saw that this stands in much
the same relations to the engines, we will say, of the Great Eastern
steamship as the amoeba to man, were to declare that the Great
Eastern engines were not designed at all, on the ground that no one
in the early kettle days had foreseen so great a future development,
and were unable to understand that a piecemeal solvitur ambulando
design is more omnipresent, all-seeing, and all-searching, and hence
more truly in the strictest sense design, than any speculative leap
of fancy, however bold and even at times successful.

From Lamarck I went on to Buffon and Erasmus Darwin--better men both
of them than Lamarck, and treated by him much as he has himself been
treated by those who have come after him--and found that the system
of these three writers, if considered rightly, and if the corollary
that heredity is only a mode of memory were added, would get us out
of our dilemma as regards descent and design, and enable us to keep
both. We could do this by making the design manifested in organism
more like the only design of which we know anything, and therefore
the only design of which we ought to speak--I mean our own.