CHARLES DARWIN 129 



liminary sketch of his theory that he had written twelve 

 years before so as to bring it into book form, but with 

 no immediate intention of publishing. In May 1857 he 

 wrote: "I find the subject so very large, that, though 

 I have written many chapters, I do not suppose I shall 

 go to press for two years." 



Then there descended a bolt from the blue that forced 

 his hand. Alfred Russel Wallace, a young architect, 

 who had for some years exchanged his practice for a 

 life of travel and exploration in Brazil and Malaya, and 

 with whom Darwin had had considerable correspondence 

 on natural history subjects, sent him an essay on The 

 Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the 

 Original Type, the outcome of his observations and 

 meditations amid the tropical forests of the Eastern 

 Archipelago, and which, as Darwin says, was, in effect, 

 an admirable abstract of his own unpublished book. 

 After consultation with his two most intimate friends 

 Lyell and Hooker, he decided to pubUsh Wallace's essay 

 and an abstract of his own work simultaneously, and the 

 two papers were thus read to the Linnean Society on 

 July 1st, 1858, a truly historic date and one to be re- 

 membered by every student of biology. 



A httle over a year thereafter appeared the famous 

 volume. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural 

 Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the 

 Struggle for Life. I am not going to attempt to sum- 

 marise in my own words a work of which Hooker writes, 

 "It is the very hardest book to read to full profit, that 

 I ever tried," and which Huxley, one of the clearest- 

 headed of the biologists of the last century, pronounced 

 " oae_ of the hardest books to master." I prefer that 

 ^ou should have Huxley's own summary as given in his 

 obituary notice of Darwin to the Royal Society, and 

 also Wallace's presentation of the theory published in 

 his essay on " Creation by Law," in the Quarterly Journal 

 of Science in 1868. 



9 



