laws in accordance with which organic forms assumed their present
shape to be--"Growth with reproduction; Variability from the
indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life and
from use and disuse, &c." {158a} Wherein does this differ from the
confession of faith made by Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck? Where are
the accidental fortuitous, spontaneous variations now? And if they
are not found important enough to demand mention in this peroration
and stretto, as it were, of the whole matter, in which special
prominence should be given to the special feature of the work, where
ought they to be made important?

Mr. Darwin immediately goes on: "A ratio of existence so high as to
lead to a struggle for life, and as a consequence to natural
selection, entailing divergence of character and the extinction of
less improved forms;" so that natural selection turns up after all.
Yes--in the letters that compose it, but not in the spirit; not in
the special sense up to this time attached to it in the "Origin of
Species." The expression as used here is one with which Erasmus
Darwin would have found little fault, for it means not as elsewhere
in Mr. Darwin's book and on his title-page the preservation of
"favoured" or lucky varieties, but the preservation of varieties
that have come to be varieties through the causes assigned in the
preceding two or three lines of Mr. Darwin's sentence; and these are
mainly functional or Erasmus-Darwinian; for the indirect action of
the conditions of life is mainly functional, and the direct action
is admitted on all hands to be but small.

It now appears more plainly, as insisted upon on an earlier page,
that there is not one natural selection and one survival of the
fittest, but two, inasmuch as there are two classes of variations