The explanation is sufficiently obvious. Mr Darwin wanted to hedge. He saw that the design which his works had been mainly instrumental in pitchforking out of organisms no less manifestly designed than a burglar’s jemmy is designed, had nevertheless found its way back again, and that though, as I insisted in “Evolution Old and New,” and “Unconscious Memory,” it must now be placed within the organism instead of outside it, as “was formerly the case,” it was not on that account any the less—design, as well as interesting. 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 1881. “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. There was a little something here and there, but not much. It may be expected that I should say something here about Mr. Romanes’ latest contribution to biology—I mean his theory of physiological selection, of which the two first instalments have appeared in _Nature_ just as these pages are leaving my hands, and many months since the foregoing, and most of the following chapters were written. I admit to feeling a certain sense of thankfulness that they did not appear earlier; as it is, my book is too far advanced to be capable of further embryonic change, and this must be my excuse for saying less about Mr. Romanes’ theory than I might perhaps otherwise do. I cordially, however, agree with the _Times_, which says that “Mr. George Romanes appears to be the biological investigator on whom the mantle of Mr. Darwin has most conspicuously descended” (August 16, 1886). Mr. Romanes is just the person whom the late Mr. Darwin would select to carry on his work, and Mr. Darwin was just the kind of person towards whom Mr. Romanes would find himself instinctively attracted.