should have said so in a prominent passage of some later edition of
the "Origin of Species." He should have said--"In my earlier
editions I underrated, as now seems probable, the effects of use and
disuse as purveyors of the slight successive modifications whose
accumulation in the ordinary course of things results in specific
difference, and I laid too much stress on the accumulation of merely
accidental variations;" having said this, he should have summarised
the reasons that had made him change his mind, and given a list of
the most important cases in which he has seen fit to alter what he
had originally written. If Mr. Darwin had dealt thus with us we
should have readily condoned all the mistakes he would have been at
all likely to have made, for we should have known him as one who was
trying to help us, tidy us up, keep us straight, and enable us to
use our judgments to the best advantage. The public will forgive
many errors alike of taste and judgment, where it feels that a
writer persistently desires this.

I can only remember a couple of sentences in the later editions of
the "Origin of Species" in which Mr. Darwin directly admits a change
of opinion as regards the main causes of organic modification. How
shuffling the first of these is I have already shown in "Life and
Habit," p. 260, and in "Evolution, Old and New," p. 359; I need not,
therefore, say more here, especially as there has been no rejoinder
to what I then said. Curiously enough the sentence does not bear
out Mr. Spencer's contention that Mr. Darwin in his later years
leaned more decidedly towards functionally produced modifications,
for it runs: {161a}--"In the earlier editions of this work I
underrated, as now seems probable, the frequency and importance of
modifications due," not, as Mr. Spencer would have us believe, to
use and disuse, but "to spontaneous variability," by which can only