Whether his readers actually did understand
this as clearly as Mr. Wallace doubtless desired that they should,
and whether greater development at this point would not have helped
them to fuller apprehension, we need not now inquire. What was
gained in distinctness might have been lost in distinctiveness, and
after all he did technically put us upon our guard.
Nevertheless, he too at a pinch takes refuge in Lamarckism. In
relation to the manner in which the eyes of soles, turbots, and
other flat-fish travel round the head so as to become in the end
unsymmetrically placed, he says:--
"The eyes of these fish are curiously distorted in order that both
eyes may be upon the upper side, where alone they would be of any
use. . . . Now if we suppose this process, which in the young is
completed in a few days or weeks, to have been spread over thousands
of generations during the development of these fish, those usually
surviving _whose eyes retained more and more of the position into
which the young fish tried to twist them_ [italics mine], the change
becomes intelligible.
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