I should like to have seen Mr. Darwin say this more explicitly. Indeed I
should have liked to have seen Mr. Darwin say anything at all about the
meaning of which there could be no mistake, and without contradicting
himself elsewhere; but this was not Mr. Darwin's manner.
In passing I will give another example of Mr. Darwin's manner when he did
not quite dare even to hedge. It is to be found in the preface which he
wrote to Professor Weismann's Studies in the Theory of Descent, published
in 1882.
"Several distinguished naturalists," says Mr. Darwin, "maintain with much
confidence that organic beings tend to vary and to rise in the scale,
independently of the conditions to which they and their progenitors have
been exposed; whilst others maintain that all variation is due to such
exposure, though the manner in which the environment acts is as yet quite
unknown. At the present time there is hardly any question in biology of
more importance than this of the nature and causes of variability, and
the reader will find in the present work an able discussion on the whole
subject which will probably lead him to pause before he admits the
existence of an innate tendency to perfectibility"--or towards, _being
able to be perfected_.
I could find no able discussion upon the whole subject in Professor
Weismann's book.
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