“They do not seem to be aware of this, for they make no attempt to examine Mr. Darwin’s accumulated facts and arguments.” Professor Ray Lankester need not shake Mr. Darwin’s “accumulated facts and arguments” at us. We have taken more pains to understand them than Professor Ray Lankester has taken to understand Lamarck, and by this time know them sufficiently. We thankfully accept by far the greater number, and rely on them as our sheet-anchors to save us from drifting on to the quicksands of Neo-Darwinian natural selection; few of them, indeed, are Mr. Darwin’s, except in so far as he has endorsed them and given them publicity, but I do not know that this detracts from their value. We have paid great attention to Mr. Darwin’s facts, and if we do not understand all his arguments—for it is not always given to mortal man to understand these—yet we think we know what he was driving at. We believe we understand this to the full as well as Mr. Darwin intended us to do, and perhaps better. Where the arguments tend to show that all animals and plants are descended from a common source we find them much the same as Buffon’s, or as those of Erasmus Darwin or Lamarck, and have nothing to say against them; where, on the other hand, they aim at proving that the main means of modification has been the fact that if an animal has been “favoured” it will be “preserved”—then we think that the animal’s own exertions will, in the long run, have had more to do with its preservation than any real or fancied “favour.” Professor Ray Lankester continues:— “The doctrine of evolution has become an accepted truth” (Professor Ray Lankester writes as though the making of truth and falsehood lay in the hollow of Mr. Darwin’s hand. Surely “has become accepted” should be enough; Mr. Darwin did not make the doctrine true) “entirely in consequence of Mr. Darwin’s having demonstrated the mechanism.” (There is no mechanism in the matter, and if there is, Mr. Darwin did not show it. He made some words which confused us and prevented us from seeing that “the preservation of favoured races” was a cloak for “luck,” and that this was all the explanation he was giving) “by which the evolution is possible; it was almost universally rejected, while such undemonstrable agencies as those arbitrarily asserted to exist by Professor Semper and Mr. George Henslow were the only means suggested by its advocates.”