Abstract
SOME months ago Sir Ray Lankester was good enough to write to me in regard to the statement in my “System of Animate Nature” (1920) that he had spoken of evolution as “a chapter of accidents”. He asked me to verify the quotation, and I thought I had only to turn to my book-shelves for a minute to find the passage. But in spite of some months of very agreeable and profitable re-reading of Sir Ray Lankester's writings, I have failed to verify the quotation, and the only thing to do is to apologise. Perhaps I should have seen that the phrase I ascribea to Sir Ray Lankester was inconsistent with such sentences as these:—“Thus then it appears that the conclusion that Man is a part of Nature is by no means equivalent to asserting that he has originated by ‘blind chance’; it is, in fact, a specific assertion that he is the predestined outcome of an orderly, and to a large extent ‘perceptible,’ mechanism” (“The Kingdom of Man”, p. 9); and “They [the mental qualities which have evolved in Man’ justify the view that Man forms a new departure in the gradual unfolding of Nature's predestined scheme” (op. cit., P. 25).
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THOMSON, J. A Correction. Nature 107, 811 (1921). https://doi.org/10.1038/107811a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/107811a0
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