CnAELES DAKWIN. 113 



the 'Origin of Species,' and in 185G lie begins to write out his 

 views on a scale three or four times as extensive as that which he 

 afterwards followed. " But," he says, " my plans were over- 

 thrown, for, early in the summer of 1858, Mr Wallace, who 

 was then in the Malay Archipelago, sent me an essay ' On the 

 Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original 

 Type ' ; and this essay contained exactly the same theory as mine." 

 With some men such a circumstance as this might have led to a 

 life-long jealousy, but not with men of such noble characters as 

 Darwin and Wallace; with them it led to a life-long friendship. 

 Darwin consults his two greatest scientific friends near at hand. 

 Sir Charles Lyell and Sir Joseph Hooker, and they urge him to send 

 to the Linnean Society, with Wallace's essay, an extract from his 

 own MS. of his projected work on the ' Origin of Species,' written 

 twenty years before. He is at first very unwilling to consent, 

 thinking that Wallace might consider his action unjustifiable, 

 for, he says, "I did not then know how generous and noble 

 lie was." Wallace's essay and Darwin's extract were published 

 together in the ' Journal of the Linnean Society,' and attracted 

 but little attention at the time. 



With "thirteen months and ten days' hard laboiir," Darwin 

 then makes an abstract of his MS., and on the same reduced 

 scale completes the ' Origin of Species ; ' and in November, 1859, 

 his greatest work appeared. " Though considerably added to and 

 corrected in later editions," he says in his Autobiography, " it has 

 remained substantially the same book." 



The ' Origin of Species ' is not an easy book to read. It requires 

 close attention and much thought. Although crowded with facts 

 tending to support the argument, the presence of the thought that 

 some persons may not be convinced by them is too evident. With 

 excessive honesty Darwin brings prominently forward every con- 

 ceivable objection to his theory, and although he refutes each 

 one, the impression left on the mind of most readers must be less 

 clear than if the work had been written on the assumption that it 

 must necessarily carry conviction of the truth of the theory to 

 every mind. In place of a brilliant impression, however, the work 

 gives a deep conviction, and the more the facts and arguments are 

 thought over, the more certain does it appear that species are not 

 stable, but are modified descendants of other species, owing their 

 differences to slight variations which have been perpetuated, with 

 further modifications, by advantages thus accruing over unmodified 

 forms in the perpetual struggle for existence. Although this work 

 can never be so popular as the 'Journal of Researches,' which any 



