mainly functional. I am fairly well acquainted with the literature
of evolution, and have never met with any such attempt. But let
this pass; as with Mr. Darwin, so with Mr. Wallace, and so indeed
with all who accept Mr. Charles Darwin's natural selection as the
main means of modification, the central idea is luck, while the
central idea of the Erasmus-Darwinian system is cunning.

I have given the opinions of these contending parties in their
extreme development; but they both admit abatements which bring them
somewhat nearer to one another. Design, as even its most strenuous
upholders will admit, is a difficult word to deal with; it is, like
all our ideas, substantial enough until we try to grasp it--and
then, like all our ideas, it mockingly eludes us; it is like life or
death--a rope of many strands; there is design within design, and
design within undesign; there is undesign within design (as when a
man shuffles cards designing that there shall be no design in their
arrangement), and undesign within undesign; when we speak of cunning
or design in connection with organism we do not mean cunning, all
cunning, and nothing but cunning, so that there shall be no place
for luck; we do not mean that conscious attention and forethought
shall have been bestowed upon the minutest details of action, and
nothing been left to work itself out departmentally according to
precedent, or as it otherwise best may according to the chapter of
accidents.

So, again, when Mr. Darwin and his followers deny design and effort
to have been the main purveyors of the variations whose accumulation
results in specific difference, they do not entirely exclude the
action of use and disuse--and this at once opens the door for
cunning; nevertheless, according to Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, the