win with greater sagacity was ever on the retreat from Darwinism. Mr.
Wallace's profounder faith led him in the outset to place his theory in
fuller daylight than Mr. Darwin was inclined to do. Mr. Darwin just
waved Lamarck aside, and said as little about him as he could, while in
his earlier editions Erasmus Darwin and Buffon were not so much as named.
Mr. Wallace, on the contrary, at once raised the Lamarckian spectre, and
declared it exorcised. He said the Lamarckian hypothesis was "quite
unnecessary." The giraffe did not "acquire its long neck by desiring to
reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly stretching its
neck for this purpose, but because any varieties which occurred among its
antitypes with a longer neck than usual at once secured a fresh range of
pasture over the same ground as their shorter-necked companions, and on
the first scarcity of food were thus enabled to outlive them." {23}

"Which occurred" is evidently "which happened to occur" by some chance or
accident unconnected with use and disuse. The word "accident" is never
used, but Mr. Wallace must be credited with this instance of a desire to
give his readers a chance of perceiving that according to his distinctive
feature evolution is an affair of luck, rather than of cunning. Whether
his readers actually did understand this as clearly as Mr. Wallace
doubtless desired that they should, and whether greater development at
this point would not have helped them to fuller apprehension, we need not
now inquire. What was gained in distinctness might have been lost in
distinctiveness, and after all he did technically put us upon our guard.

Nevertheless he too at a pinch takes refuge in Lamarckism. In relation
to the manner in which the eyes of soles, turbots, and other flat-fish
travel round the head so as to become in the end unsymmetrically placed,
he says:--

"The eyes of these fish are curiously distorted in order that both eyes
may be upon the upper side, where alone they would be of any use. . . .
Now if we suppose this process, which in the young is completed in a few
days or weeks, to have been spread over thousands of generations during
the development of these fish, those usually surviving _whose eyes
retained more and more of the position into which the young fish tried to
twist them_ [italics mine], the change becomes intelligible." {24} When
it was said by Professor Ray Lankester--who knows as well as most people
w