Thus he writes (“Natural Selection,” p. 176, ed. 1876): “Although we have no good evidence of the existence in organic beings of a tendency towards progressive development, yet this necessarily follows, as I have attempted to show in the fourth chapter, through the continued action of natural selection.” Mr. Darwin does not say that organic beings have no tendency to vary at all, but only that there is no good evidence that they have a tendency to progressive development, which, I take it, means, to see an ideal a long way off, and very different to their present selves, which ideal they think will suit them, and towards which they accordingly make. I would admit this as contrary to all experience. I doubt whether plants and animals have any _innate tendency to vary_ at all, being led to question this by gathering from “Plants and Animals under Domestication” that this is Mr. Darwin’s own opinion. I am inclined rather to think that they have only an innate _power to vary_ slightly, in accordance with changed conditions, and an innate capability of being affected both in structure and instinct, by causes similar to those which we observe to affect ourselves. But however this may be, they do vary somewhat, and unless they did, they would not in time have come to be so widely different from each other as they now are. The question is as to the origin and character of these variations. We say they mainly originate in a creature through a sense of its needs, and vary through the varying surroundings which will cause those needs to vary, and through the opening up of new desires in many creatures, as the consequence of the gratification of old ones; they depend greatly on differences of individual capacity and temperament; they are communicated, and in the course of time transmitted, as what we call hereditary habits or structures, though these are only, in truth, intense and epitomised memories of how certain creatures liked to deal with protoplasm. The question whether this or that is really good or ill, is settled, as the proof of the pudding by the eating thereof, _i.e._, by the rigorous competitive examinations through which most living organisms must pass. Mr. Darwin says that there is no good evidence in support of any great principle, or tendency on the part of the creature itself, which would steer variation, as it were, and keep its head straight, but that the most marvellous adaptations of structures to needs are simply the result of small and blind variations, accumulated by the operation of “natural selection,” which is thus the main cause of the origin of species.