THE 'ORIGIN OF SPECIES.' 55 1 



brought face to face with facts and have their validity tested. 

 The ' Origin ' provided us with the working hypothesis we 

 sought. Moreover, it did the immense service of freeing us 

 for ever from the dilemma — refuse to accept the creation 

 hypothesis, and what have you to propose that can be accepted 

 by any cautious reasoner? In 1857, I had no answer ready, 

 and I do not think that any one else had. A year later, we 

 reproached ourselves with dulness for being perplexed by 

 such an inquiry. My reflection, when I first made myself 

 master of the central idea of the ' Origin,' was, " How ex- 

 tremely stupid not to have thought of that ! " I suppose that 

 Columbus' companions said much the same when he made 

 the egg stand on end. The facts of variability, of the struggle 

 for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious 

 enough ; but none of us had suspected that the road to the 

 heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin 

 and Wallace dispelled the darkness, and the beacon-fire of 

 the * Origin ' guided the benighted. 



Whether the particular shape which the doctrine of evolu- 

 tion, as applied to the organic world, took in Darwin's hands, 

 would prove to be final or not, was, to me, a matter of in- 

 difference. In my earliest criticisms of the ' Origin ' I ven- 

 tured to point out that its logical foundation was insecure so 

 long as experiments in selective breeding had not produced 

 varieties which were more or less infertile ; and that inse- 

 curity remains up to the present time. But, with any and 

 every critical doubt which my sceptical ingenuity could sug- 

 gest, the Darwinian hypothesis remained incomparably more 

 probable than the creation hypothesis. And if we had none 

 of us been able to discern the paramount significance of some 

 of the most patent and notorious of natural facts, until they 

 were, so to speak, thrust under our noses, what force remained 

 in the dilemma — creation or nothing ? It was obvious that, 

 hereafter, the probability would be immensely greater, that the 

 links of natural causation were hidden from our purblind 

 eyes, than that natural causation should be incompetent to 

 produce all the phenomena of nature. The only rational 



