cess of modification is
conceivable, they would be in a better position than their opponents.
But they can do much more than this; they can show that the process of
modification has effected and is effecting great changes in all
organisms, subject to modifying influences ... they can show that any
existing species--animal or vegetable--when placed under conditions
different from its previous ones, _immediately begins to undergo certain
changes of structure_ fitting it for the new conditions. They can show
that in successive generations these changes continue until ultimately
the new conditions become the natural ones. They can show that in
cultivated plants and domesticated animals, and in the several races of
men, these changes have uniformly taken place. They can show that the
degrees of difference, so produced, are often, as in dogs, greater than
those on which distinctions of species are in other cases founded. They
can show that it is a matter of dispute whether some of these modified
forms _are_ varieties or modified species. They can show too that the
changes daily taking place in ourselves; the facility that attends long
practice, and the loss of aptitude that begins when practice ceases; the
strengthening of passions habitually gratified, and the weakening of
those habitually curbed; the development of every faculty, bodily, moral
or intellectual, according to the use made of it, are all explicable on
this same principle. And thus they can show that throughout all organic
nature there _is_ at work a modifying influence of the kind they assign
as the cause of these specific differences, an influence which, though
slow in its action, does in time, if the circumstances demand it,
produce marked changes; an influence which, to all appearance, would
produce in the millions of years, and under the great varieties of
condition which geological records imply, any amount of change."

This leaves nothing to be desired. It is Buffon, Dr. Darwin, and
Lamarck, well expressed. Those were the days before "Natural Selection"
had been discharged into the waters of the evolution controversy, like
the secretion of a cuttle fish. Changed circumstances immediately induce
changed habits, and hence a changed use of some organs, and disuse of
others: as a consequence of this, organs and instincts become changed,
"and these changes continue in successive generations, until ultimately
the new conditions become the natural ones." This is