254 LAY SERMONS, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS. [xn, 



he had been preparing for twenty years, and parts of which, 

 containing a development of the very same views, had been 

 perused by his private friends fifteen or sixteen years before. 

 Perplexed in what manner to do full justice both to his friend 

 and to himself, Mr. Darwin placed the matter in the hands of 

 Dr. Hooker and Sir Charles Lyell, by whose advice he communi 

 cated a brief abstract of his own views to the Linnaean Society, 

 at the same time that Mr. Wallace s paper was read. Of that 

 abstract, the work on the &quot; Origin of Species &quot; is an enlargement ; 

 but a complete statement of Mr. Darwin s doctrine is looked for 

 in the large and well-illustrated work which he is said to be 

 preparing for publication. 



The Darwinian hypothesis has the merit of being eminently 

 simple and comprehensible in principle, and its essential positions 

 may be stated in a very few words : all species have been produced 

 by the development of varieties from common stocks by the con 

 version of these first into permanent races and then into new 

 species, by the process of natural selection, which process is 

 essentially identical with that artificial selection by which man 

 has originated the races of domestic animals the struggle for 

 existence taking the place of man, and exerting, in the case of 

 natural selection, that selective action which he performs in 

 artificial selection. 



The evidence brought forward by Mr. Darwin in support of his 

 hypothesis is of three kinds. First, he endeavours to prove that 

 species may be originated by selection ; secondly, he attempts to 

 show that natural causes are competent to exert selection ; and 

 thirdly, he tries to prove that the most remarkable and appar 

 ently anomalous phsenomena exhibited by the distribution, 

 development, and mutual relations of species, can be shown to be 

 deducible from the general doctrine of their origin, which he 

 propounds, combined with the known facts of geological 

 change; and that, even if all these phsenomena are not at 

 present explicable by it, none are necessarily inconsistent 

 with it. 



