196 HUXLEY AND NATURAL SELECTION 



upon the larks of the Sahara, made use of the Darwin- 

 Wallace theory in the interpretation of the colours of 

 desert animals. 



The Origin of Species was published, and the whole 

 of the 1,250 copies sold, on November 24, 1859. An 

 advance copy had been sent by Darwin to the 

 friend whose opinion he was so extremely anxious to 

 learn. ' I shall be intensely curious to hear what effect 

 the book produces on you,' he wrote on October 15. 1 

 Huxley replied on November 23 that he had finished the 

 Origin on the previous day. He wrote of ' the great 

 store of new views you have given me ' ; 2 and in his 

 chapter On the Reception of the Origin of Species, he 

 says, ' my reflection, when I first made myself master of 

 the central idea of the " Origin " was, " How extremely 

 stupid not to have thought of that !" ' 3 — further evidence 

 that he knew nothing of the subject of the Linnean Society 

 memoir, where this central idea is admirably, although of 

 course briefly, set forth and illustrated by its two great 

 discoverers. 



Huxley's ignorance of Natural Selection between July 

 1, 1858, and the end of November, 1859, suggests certain 

 interesting conclusions. Great and original workers rarely 

 have the time for wide reading in their subject away 

 from the lines of their special investigations. But want 

 of time is not the only cause. They are, perhaps 

 unconsciously, led by an instinct which warns them that 

 the attempt to be encyclopaedic, though within the limits 

 of but a single science, is itself destructive of originality. 

 And yet there is nothing so inspiring to a young worker 

 as the fact that his attempts have interested a great leader 

 in his own subject. To a Darwin at the age of fifty, it 

 may be a small thing that his younger friend is too 

 engrossed to read his paper, and yet many years before 

 we know that even Darwin keenly felt the neglect, as it 

 appeared to be, of his early geological work. Thus he 

 wrote in 1844 or 1845: 'I have long discovered that 

 geologists never read each other's works, and that the 



1 Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, London, 1887, vol. ii, pp. 172, 3. 

 8 Ibid. p. 231, s Ibid. p. 197. 



