Mr. Spencer would not—at least one cannot think he would—have been able to effect the revolution which will henceforth doubtless be connected with Mr. Darwin’s name. He had been insisting on evolution for some years before the “Origin of Species” came out, but he might as well have preached to the winds, for all the visible effect that had been produced. On the appearance of Mr. Darwin’s book the effect was instantaneous; it was like the change in the condition of a patient when the right medicine has been hit on after all sorts of things have been tried and failed. Granted that it was comparatively easy for Mr. Darwin, as having been born into the household of one of the prophets of evolution, to arrive at conclusions about the fixity of species which, if not so born, he might never have reached at all; this does not make it any easier for him to have got others to agree with him. Any one, again, may have money left him, or run up against it, or have it run up against him, as it does against some people, but it is only a very sensible person who does not lose it. Moreover, once begin to go behind achievement and there is an end of everything. Did the world give much heed to or believe in evolution before Mr. Darwin’s time? Certainly not. Did we begin to attend and be persuaded soon after Mr. Darwin began to write? Certainly yes. Did we ere long go over _en masse_? Assuredly. If, as I said in “Life and Habit,” any one asks who taught the world to believe in evolution, the answer to the end of time must be that it was Mr. Darwin. And yet the more his work is looked at, the more marvellous does its success become. It seems as if some organisms can do anything with anything. Beethoven picked his teeth with the snuffers, and seems to have picked them sufficiently to his satisfaction. So Mr. Darwin with one of the worst styles imaginable did all that the clearest, tersest writer could have done. Strange, that such a master of cunning (in the sense of my title) should have been the apostle of luck, and one so terribly unlucky as Lamarck, of cunning, but such is the irony of nature. Buffon planted, Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck watered, but it was Mr. Darwin who said, “That fruit is ripe,” and shook it into his lap.