HIS 'ORIGIN OF SPECIES' 253 



laborious task of accumulating evidence. His friends 

 were of course well aware of the nature of his research, 

 and of the remarkable views to which he had been led 

 regarding the history of species. And as these views 

 could hardly fail in the end to become generally known, 

 it was desirable that the first publication of them should 

 be made by himself. This having been urged upon 

 him by Lyell, he began early in the year 1856 to write 

 out his views in detail on a scale three or four times as 

 large as that on which the Origin of Species afterwards 

 appeared. This work he continued steadily for two 

 years, when it was interrupted (June 1858) by the 

 arrival of a remarkable manuscript essay by Mr. A. R. 

 Wallace, who, working in the Malay archipelago, had 

 arrived at conclusions identical with those of Darwin 

 himself. Darwin's generous impulse was to send this 

 essay for publication irrespective of any claim of his 

 own to priority : but his friends, Lyell and Sir Joseph 

 Hooker, persuaded him to allow extracts from his early 

 sketch of 1 844, and part of a letter written to Professor 

 Asa Gray in 1857, to be read, together with Mr. 

 Wallace's contribution, before the Linnean Society, 

 and to be printed in the Society's Journal. He now 

 set to work upon that epitome of his observations and 

 deductions which appeared in November 1859, as the 

 immortal Origin of Species. 



Those who are old enough to remember the publi- 

 cation of this work, cannot but marvel at the change 

 which, since that day, not yet thirty years ago, has 

 come alike upon the non-scientific and the scientific 

 part of the community in their estimation of it. Pro- 

 fessor Huxley has furnished to the Biography a 



