NATURAL SELECTION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY 245 



hearted, indefatigable student, whose interest in nature never 

 halted or wavered, and whose most important work, the " History 

 of the Invertebrates," was undertaken when he was old and blind, 

 and in poverty and suffering. 



We must, therefore, search more deeply for the secret of the 

 rejection by English naturalists of Lamarck's hypothesis, and their 

 welcome to the " Origin of Species." 



In 1844, or sixteen years before the publication of the "Ori- 

 gin," Darwin writes to Hooker: "I have been now ever since 

 my return engaged in a very presumptuous work, and I know 

 not one individual who would not say a very foolish one. I am 

 so struck with the distribution of the Galapagos organisms, etc., 

 and with the character of the American mammifers, etc., that I 

 determined to collect blindly every sort of fact which could bear 

 in any way on what are called species. I have read heaps of 

 agricultural and horticultural books and have never ceased collect- 

 ing facts. At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost 

 convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that spe- 

 cies are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven 

 forf end me from Lamarck nonsense of a ' tendency to progres- 

 sion,' ' adaptations through the slow willing of animals,' etc. But 

 the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his: 

 though the means of change are wholly so. / think I have found 

 out (here's presumption) the simple way in which species become 

 exquisitely adapted to various ends. You will now groan, and think 

 to yourself, 'on what a man I have been wasting my time and 

 writing to.' I should five years ago have thought so." 



Darwin gives a list of thirty-five writers who, during the early 

 part of the nineteenth century, expressed belief in the mutability of 

 species, or, at least, disbelief in separate acts of creation, before his 

 own work was published ; and even at an earlier date the specula- 

 tions of Oken, Goethe, Buffon, and others had brought the subject 

 into prominence. 



Of all these writers Lamarck had put the question in the most 

 definite form and discussed it most completely. His views are the 

 only ones which had attracted much attention, but while they were 

 well known in England they had little influence there upon the men 

 of science, except to cast discredit on new attempts. " The hypoth- 



