250 LIFE: ITS NATURE AND ORIGIN 



tion, Chambers remarked that the existence of various domes- 

 ticated races of animals indicates that at best certain species could 

 become heritably modified. He also thought that the existence 

 of rudimentary organs militated against the hypothesis of special 

 creation, i.e., small teeth in the fetus of the whalebone whale, tiny 

 imperfect extra toes on the splintbones of horses, traces of hind 

 limbs in certain snakes. As Punnett observes, the great popularity 

 of "Vestiges" indicated that educated people were not averse to 

 the notion of the mutability of species; but apart from scientific 

 imperfections, the book gave no reasonable suggestion as to the 

 process whereby a heritable succession of forms could be estab- 

 lished. 



Natural selection was the mechanism proposed by Charles 

 Robert Darwin (1809-1882) and Alfred Russell Wallace (1823- 

 1913) to account for this heritable succession, and they reached 

 this conclusion independently — Darwin as a result of twenty years 

 of study, Wallace during an attack of intermittent fever at Ternate 

 in the Moluccas, in February, 1858, when thinking of Malthus's 

 "Essay on Population" which he had read a few years before. 

 This essay had also stimulated Darwin. When the idea of the 

 survival of the fittest emerged, Wallace said that in a couple of 

 hours he had thought out the whole theory. In three evenings 

 he finished his paper, which he sent to Darwin for an opinion, and 

 thus precipitated the publication of Darwin's work, first in a joint 

 paper read to the Linnean Society on July 1st, 1858, and next 

 year in "The Origin of the Species." P. C. Mitchell, Secretary of 

 the Zoological Society of London, points out that the theory of 

 natural selection, or survival of the fittest, had been suggested by 

 William Charles Wells in 1813, and further elaborated by Patrick 

 Matthew in 1831; but their pregnant suggestions remained prac- 

 tically unnoticed or forgotten. 



It is interesting to note that Constantine Samuel Rafinesque wrote 

 in 1832: "There is a tendency to deviations and mutations through 

 plants and animals by gradual steps at remote irregular periods. This 

 is a part of the great universal law of perpetual mutability in ever- 

 thing." Born in Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1783, Rafinesque spent 

 ten years in Sicily, and lost his extensive herbal and sea-shell collec- 

 tions together with all his papers when shipwrecked on his way to 

 America in 1815. Within the next 20 years he accumulated an herb- 

 arium of 40,000 specimens. He visited Audubon, taught foreign 

 languages at Transylvania University (Lexington, Kentucky), and in 



