286 OBITUARY - 



1859, under the title " On the Origin of Species 

 by means of Natural Selection or the Preservation 

 of Favoured Races in the Struggle of Life." 



It is doubtful if any single book, except the 

 " Principia," ever worked so great and so rapid a 

 revolution in science, or made so deep an 

 impression on the general mind. It aroused a 

 tempest of opposition and met with equally 

 vehement support, and it must be added that 

 no book has been more widely and persistently 

 misunderstood by both friends and foes. In 1861, 

 Darwin remarks to a correspondent, " You under- 

 stand my book perfectly, and that I find a very 

 rare event with my critics." (I. p. 313.) The 

 immense popularity which the " Origin " at once 

 acquired was no doubt largely due to its many 

 points of contact with philosophical and theo- 

 logical questions in which every intelligent man 

 feels a profound interest; but a good deal must 

 be assigned to a somewhat delusive simplicity of 

 style, which tends to disguise the complexity and 

 difficulty of the subject, and much to the wealth 

 of information on all sorts of curious problems of 

 natural history, which is made accessible to the 

 most unlearned reader. But long occupation with 

 the work has led the present writer to believe 

 that the " Origin of Species " is one of the hardest 

 of books to master ; 1 and he is justified in this 



1 He is comforted to find that probably the best qualified 

 judge among all the readers of the Origin in 1859 was of the 



