THE 'ORIGIN OF SPECIES.' 1 97 



houses ! " and disposed to turn aside from an interminable and 

 apparently fruitless discussion, to labour in the fertile fields 

 of ascertainable fact. And I may, therefore, further suppose 

 that the publication of the Darwin and Wallace papers in 

 1858, and still more that of the 'Origin' in 1859, had the 

 effect upon them of the flash of light, which to a man who 

 has lost himself in a dark night, suddenly reveals a road 

 which, whether it takes him straight home or not, certainly 

 goes his way. That which we were looking for, and could 

 not find, was a hypothesis respecting the origin of known 

 organic forms, which assumed the operation of no causes but 

 such as could be proved to be actually at work. We wanted, 

 not to pin our faith to that or any other speculation, but to 

 get hold of clear and definite conceptions which could be 

 brought face to face with facts and have their validity tested. 

 The ' Origin ' provided us with the working hypothesis we 

 sought. Moreover, it did the immense service of freeing 

 us for ever from the dilemma refuse to accept the creation 

 hypothesis, and what have you to propose that can be accepted 

 by any cautious reasoner? In 1857, I had no answer ready, 

 and I do not think that any one else had. A year later, we 

 reproached ourselves with dulness for being perplexed by 

 such an inquiry. My reflection, when I first made myself 

 master of the central idea of the ' Origin/ was, " How ex- 

 tremely stupid not to have thought of that ! ' I suppose that 

 Columbus' companions said much the same when he made 

 the egg stand on end. The facts of variability, of the struggle 

 for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious 

 enough ; but none of us had suspected that the road to the 

 heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin 

 and Wallace dispelled the darkness, and the beacon-fire of 

 the ' Origin ' guided the benighted. 



Whether the particular shape which the doctrine of evolu- 

 tion, as applied to the organic world, took in Darwin's hands, 

 would prove to be final or not, was, to me, a matter of indiffer- 



