NATURAL HISTORY NINETEENTH CENTURY. 639 



and Lamarck, appear to have all independently and nearly simulta- 

 neously arrived at similar conceptions of the unity of organic nature, 

 and of its plasticity or power of moulding itself to the surrounding con- 

 ditions. Such ideas were not generally accepted by naturalists until 

 about twenty years ago, when, mainly by the labours of an English 

 naturalist, they were raised to the rank of a comprehensive theory, and 

 based upon a wide range of co-ordinated facts. 



CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN, born at Shrewsbury in 1809, was the 

 grandson of the author of " Zoonomia/' " The Botanic Garden," etc. 

 He studied at Edinburgh, and afterwards at Cambridge, where he gra- 

 duated in 1831. In the same year he sailed as naturalist with Captain 

 Fitzroy, in H.M.S. Beagle, OTL a five years' voyage of scientific explora- 

 tion. Mr. Darwin published an extremely interesting account of this 

 voyage, and various important papers and treatises on geological and 

 zoological subjects. Soon after his return to England he took up his 

 residence on an estate he had acquired near Bromley, in Kent, where 

 he devoted himself to the solution of the problem that had presented 

 itself to his mind during his voyage. For twenty-one years he was col- 

 lecting facts and carrying on observations on several species of plants 

 and animals which for this purpose he largely cultivated and bred on 

 his estate. He had written in 1 844 a preliminary sketch of his theory, 

 but he refrained from publishing a single word concerning it until he 

 had accumulated a store of facts upon which it might be firmly based. 

 In 1858 Mr. ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, a distinguished traveller and 

 naturalist, who had spent many years of scientific observation in the 

 Malay Archipelago, and was then at Ternate, sent to England for pub- 

 lication an essay which showed that he had then arrived at the very 

 same conclusions to which Darwin had come some years before. Mr. 

 Wallace sent his paper for publication to Mr. Darwin himself, whose own 

 views, however, had never in any form been made public. But on the 

 solicitation of some friend, Mr. Darwin now published several extracts 

 from his manuscripts written long before, and these were read before the 

 Linnaean Society on the same evening as Mr. Wallace's essay. In 1859 

 Darwin's famous book " On the Origin of Species" was published, and 

 announced as preliminary to a larger work in two volumes " The Va- 

 riation of Animals and Plants under Domestication," which afterwards 

 appeared in 1868. It is in these works that Mr. Darwin expounds 

 that " Theory of Natural Selection " which, at the present day, every- 

 body has heard of as Darwinism. It was not Darwin who originated 

 the Theory of Descent, or of the development of one species from 

 another ; that, as we have already seen, was clearly proposed by La- 

 marck and entertained by others. But it was Darwin and Wallace 

 who first showed that real causes existed by which the transmutations 

 may have been produced. It is impossible within our limits even to 

 suggest the various classes of facts and illustrations which Darwin and 

 Wallace have advanced in support of the Theory of Natural Selection. 



