Or from among organisms whose variations are in the main matters of
luck? From variations into which a moral and intellectual system of
payment according to results has largely entered? Or from
variations which have been thrown for with dice? From variations
among which, though cards tell, yet play tells as much or more? Or
from those in which cards are everything and play goes for so little
as to be not worth taking into account? Is "the survival of the
fittest" to be taken as meaning "the survival of the luckiest" or
"the survival of those who know best how to turn fortune to
account"? Is luck the only element of fitness, or is not cunning
even more indispensable?

Mr. Darwin has a habit, borrowed, perhaps, mutatis mutandis, from
the framers of our collects, of every now and then adding the words
"through natural selection," as though this squared everything, and
descent with modification thus became his theory at once. This is
not the case. Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck believed in
natural selection to the full as much as any follower of Mr. Charles
Darwin can do. They did not use the actual words, but the idea
underlying them is the essence of their system. Mr. Patrick Matthew
epitomised their doctrine more tersely, perhaps, than was done by
any other of the pre-Charles-Darwinian evolutionists, in the
following passage which appeared in 1831, and which I have already
quoted in "Evolution Old and New" (pp. 320, 323). The passage
runs:-

"The self-regulating adaptive disposition of organised life may, in
part, be traced to the extreme fecundity of nature, who, as before
stated, has in all the varieties of her offspring a prolific power
much beyond (in many cases a thousandfold) what is necessary to fill