The Discovery of Natural Selection 



In a letter to Bates dated November 9th, 1847, he con- 

 cludes by asking, ^^ Have you read ^ Vestiges of the Natural 

 History of Creation,' or is it out of your line ? " and in the 

 next (dated December 28th), in reply to one from his friend, 

 he continues, '' I have a rather more favourable opinion of 

 the ' Vestiges ' than you appear to have. I do not consider 

 it a hasty generalisation, but rather an ingenious hypothesis 

 strongly supported by some striking facts and analogies, but 

 which remains to be proved by more facts and the additional 

 light which more research may throw upon the problem. . . . 

 It furnishes a subject for every observer of nature to attend 

 to ; every fact,'' he observes, '' will make either for or against 

 it, and it thus serves both as an incitement to the collection 

 of facts, and an object to which they can be applied when 

 collected. Many eminent writers support the theory of the 

 progressive development of animals and plants. There is a 

 very philosophical work bearing directly on the question — 

 Lawrence's * Lectures on Man.' . . . The great object of 

 these ' Lectures ' is to illustrate the different races of man- 

 kind, and the manner in w^hich they probably originated, 

 and he arrives at the conclusion (as also does Prichard 

 in his work on the * Physical History of Man ') that the 

 varieties of the human race have not been produced by 

 any external causes, but are due to the development of 

 certain distinctive peculiarities in some individuals which 

 have thereafter become propagated through an entire race. 

 Now, I should say that a permanent peculiarity not pro- 

 duced by external causes is a characteristic of ^ species ' 

 and not of mere ' variety,' and thus, if the theory of the 

 ' Vestiges ' is accepted, the Negro, the Bed Indian, and 

 the European are distinct species of the genus Homo. 



'^ An animal which differs from another by some decided 

 and permanent character, however slight, which difference is 

 undiminished by propagation and unchanged by climate and 



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