140 



PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION. 



in his Essay on Population, a book which he had 

 read some years before. Oddly enough, therefore, 

 the honours lie with the maligned Haileybury Rev- 

 erend Professor of Political Economy in furnishing 

 both Darwin and Wallace with the clue. The " posi- 

 tive checks " war, disease, famine Wallace felt 

 must act even more effectively on the lower animals 

 than on man, because of their more rapid rate of 

 multiplication. And he tells us, in the prefatory 

 note to a reprint of his paper, " there suddenly 

 flashed on me the idea of the survival of the fittest, 

 and in the two hours that elapsed before my ague 

 fit was over I had thought out the whole of the 

 theory, and in the two succeeding evenings wrote it 

 out in full and sent it by the next post to Mr. Dar- 

 win," asking him, if he thought well of the essay, to 

 send it to Lyell. This Darwin did with the following 

 remarks : " Your words have come true with a ven- 

 geance that I should be forestalled. ... I never 

 saw a more striking coincidence; if Wallace had 

 my MS. sketch written out in 1842, he could not have 

 made a better short abstract! Even his terms now 

 stand as heads of my chapters. Please return me the 

 MS., which he does not say he wishes me to publish ; 

 but I shall, of course, at once write and offer to send 

 to any journal. So all my originality, whatever it 

 may amount to, will be smashed, though my book, 

 if it will ever have any value, will not be deteriorated, 

 as all the labour consists in the application of the 

 theory." Darwin came out well in this business. 



