ix] OF EVOLUTION 111 



absent from my thoughts.' He goes on to say that 

 by 'combining the ideas he had derived from his 

 books that treated of the distribution of plants and 

 animals with those he obtained from the great work 

 of Lyell' he thought 'some valuable conclusions 

 might be reached 112 / Thus originated the very 

 remarkable paper, On the Law which has regulated 

 the Introduction of New Species, the main conclusion 

 of which was as follows : ' Every species has come into 

 existence coincident both in space and time with a 

 pre-existing closely allied species.' As Wallace has 

 himself said, 'This clearly pointed to some kind of 

 evolution... but the how was still a secret ' 



This essay was published in the Annals and 

 Magazine of Natural History in September 1855 It 

 attracted much attention from Lyell and Darwin and 

 later from Huxley. One important result of it was 

 that Darwin and Wallace entered into friendly 

 correspondence. But although Darwin in his letters 

 to Wallace informed him that he had been engaged 

 for a long time in collecting facts which bore on the 

 question of the origin of species, he gave no hint of 

 the theory of natural selection he had conceived 

 seventeen years before indeed his friends Lyell and 

 Hooker appear at that time to have been the only 

 persons, outside his family circle, whom he had taken 

 into his confidence. 



In the spring of 1858, Wallace was at Ternate in 

 the North Moluccas, where he lay sick with fever, 



