After saying that “in the public mind Mr. Darwin is perhaps most commonly regarded as the discoverer and founder of the evolution hypothesis,” he continues that “the grand idea which he did really originate was not the idea of ‘descent with modification,’ but the idea of ‘natural selection,’” and adds that it was Mr. Darwin’s “peculiar glory” to have shown the “nature of the machinery” by which all the variety of animal and vegetable life might have been produced by slow modifications in one or more original types. “The theory of evolution,” says Mr. Allen, “already existed in a more or less shadowy and undeveloped shape;” it was Mr. Darwin’s “task in life to raise this theory from the rank of a mere plausible and happy guess to the rank of a highly elaborate and almost universally accepted biological system” (pp. 3–5).
We all admit the value of Mr. Darwin’s work as having led to the general acceptance of evolution. No one who remembers average middle-class opinion on this subject before 1860 will deny that it was Mr. Darwin who brought us all round to descent with modification; but Mr. Allen cannot rightly say that evolution had only existed before Mr. Darwin’s time in “a shadowy, undeveloped state,” or as “a mere plausible and happy guess.” It existed in the same form as that in which most people accept it now, and had been carried to its extreme development, before Mr. Darwin’s father had been born. It is idle to talk of Buffon’s work as “a mere plausible and happy guess,” or to imply that the first volume of the “Philosophie Zoologique” of Lamarck was a less full and sufficient demonstration of descent with modification than the “Origin of Species” is. It has its defects, shortcomings, and mistakes, but it is an incomparably sounder work than the “Origin of Species;” and though it contains the deplorable omission of any reference to Buffon, Lamarck does not first grossly misrepresent Buffon, and then tell him to go away, as Mr. Darwin did to the author of the “Vestiges” and to Lamarck. If Mr. Darwin was believed and honoured for saying much the same as Lamarck had said, it was because Lamarck had borne the brunt of the laughing. The “Origin of Species” was possible because the “Vestiges” had prepared the way for it. The “Vestiges” were made possible by Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin, and these two were made possible by Buffon. Here a somewhat sharper line can be drawn than is usually found possible when defining the ground covered by philosophers. No one broke the ground for Buffon to anything like the extent that he broke it for those who followed him, and these broke it for one another.