HISTORICAL 39 



present time is merely historical, as showing the 

 direction in which thought was tending in the earlier 

 half of the nineteenth century. 



Before the ' Origin of Species ' was published, 

 A. R. Wallace communicated to Darwin a paper in 

 which the bearing of the same idea was worked out at 

 some length, and this paper was read, together with 

 an abstract of Darwin's own views, at a meeting of 

 the Linnean Society in July, 1858. 



With this notice of other claimants to the idea of 

 natural selection we may proceed to give an account 

 of the theory as it is developed in the earlier chapters 

 of the ' Origin of Species.' 



We must first glance at Darwin's method of using 

 the term variation. Darwin applied this term to every 

 kind of difference which is found to occur between 

 parents and their offspring, or between members of 

 the same family, no matter whether these differences 

 were great or small. It has since been shown that a 

 number of quite distinct phenomena were in this way 

 regarded from a single standpoint, without a proper 

 discrimination being made between them. But the 

 differences between continuous and discontinuous 

 variation, quantitative and qualitative variation, and 

 the rest, were not pointed out until long subsequent to 

 1859. Thus, beyond recognising a distinction between 

 sports and individual differences, and attaching greater 

 weight to the latter kind of changes, as being those 

 which chiefly led to the origin of new species, Darwin 

 made no further analysis of the facts of variation, but 

 accepted all sorts of differences between individuals as 



