the struggle going on in Mr. Darwin's mind are not discernible, with
a result alike exasperating and pitiable. I can only repeat what I
said in "Evolution Old and New," namely, that I find the task of
extracting a well-defined meaning out of Mr. Darwin's words
comparable only to that of trying to act on the advice of a lawyer
who has obscured the main issue as much as he can, and whose chief
aim has been to leave as many loopholes as possible for himself to
escape by, if things should go wrong hereafter. Or, again, to that
of one who has to construe an Act of Parliament which was originally
drawn with a view to throwing as much dust as possible in the eyes
of those who would oppose the measure, and which, having been found
utterly unworkable in practice, has had clauses repealed up and down
it till it is now in an inextricable tangle of confusion and
contradiction.

The more Mr. Darwin's work is studied, and more especially the more
his different editions are compared, the more impossible is it to
avoid a suspicion of arriere pensee as pervading it whenever the
"distinctive feature" is on the tapis. It is right to say, however,
that no such suspicion attaches to Mr. A. R. Wallace, Mr. Darwin's
fellow discoverer of natural selection. It is impossible to doubt
that Mr. Wallace believed he had made a real and important
improvement upon the Lamarckian system, and, as a natural
consequence, unlike Mr. Darwin, he began by telling us what Lamarck
had said. He did not, I admit, say quite all that I should have
been glad to have seen him say, nor use exactly the words I should
myself have chosen, but he said enough to make it impossible to
doubt his good faith, and his desire that we should understand that
with him, as with Mr. Darwin, variations are mainly accidental, not
functional. Thus, in his memorable paper communicated to the