cHAp..'xii EVOLUTION AND NATURAL SELECTION. 141 



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as mine long before (in 1844), had worked it out in con- 

 siderable detail, and had shown the MSS. to Sir Charles 

 Lyell and Sir Joseph Hooker; and on their recommenda- 

 tion my paper and sufficient extracts from his MSS. work 

 were read at a meeting of the Linnean Society in July of 

 the same year, when the theory of Natural Selection, or 

 survival of the fittest, was first made known to the world. 

 But it received little attention till Darwin's great and 

 epoch-making book appeared at the end of the following 

 year. 



We may best attain to some estimate of the greatness 

 and completeness of Darwin's work by considering the 

 vast change in educated public opinion which it rapidly 

 and permanently effected. AVhat that opinion was be- 

 fore it appeared is shown by the fact that neither La- 

 inarck, nor Herbert Spencer, nor the author of the 

 " Vestiges," had been able to make any impression upon 

 it. The very idea of progressive development of species 

 from other species was held to be a " heresy " by such 

 great and liberal-minded men as Sir John Herschel and 

 Sir Charles Lyell; the latter writer declaring, in the 

 earlier editions of his great work, that the facts of geology 

 were " fatal to the theory of progressive development." 

 The whole literary and scientific worlds were violently 

 opposed to all such theories, and altogether disbelieved in 

 the possibility of establishing them. It had been so 

 long the custom to treat species as special' creations, and 

 the mode of their creation as " the mystery of mys- 

 teries," that it had come to be considered not on^y pre- 

 sumptuous, but almost impious, for any individual to 

 profess to have lifted the veil from what was held to be 

 the greatest and most mysterious of Nature's secrets. 



