274 Britain's Heritage of Science 



thunderbolt from a cloudless sky ! This forced him to what 

 he considered a premature publicity, and his two friends 

 undertook to have our two papers read before this Society. 

 " How different from this long study and preparation 

 this philosophic caution this determination not to 

 make known his fruitful conception till he could back 

 it up by overwhelming proofs was my own conduct. 

 The idea came to me, as it had come to Darwin, in a 

 sudden flash of insight : it was thought out in a few 

 hours was written down with such a sketch of its various 

 applications and developments as occurred to me at the 

 moment, then copied on thin letter-paper and sent off 

 to Darwin all within a week. / was then (as often 

 since) the ' young man in a hurry ' : he, the painstaking 

 and patient student, seeking ever the full demonstration 

 of the truth that he had discovered, rather than to achieve 

 immediate personal fame." 



It is a remarkable fact that both naturalists owed their 

 inspiration to the same source. Both had read the " Essay 

 on Population," written by a modest clergyman named 

 Malthus, a book which on its appearance was met with a 

 storm of execration; both saw in it the demonstration of 

 that '* struggle for existence " which surrounds us on all 

 sides, and both and they alone of all the readers of Malthus) 

 saw that the necessary consequence of this struggle for 

 existence was that the fittest alone survive. This concep- 

 tion, " an essentially new creative thought," as Helmholtz 

 described it, explained the method of that evolution which 

 since the time of the Greeks has been at the back of man's 

 mind. It thus rendered the fact of evolution acceptable 

 and even inevitable in the minds of all intelligent thinkers 

 and brought about changes in our attitude to the organic 

 world and indeed in our whole relation to life greater, perhaps, 

 than have ever been produced by any previous thought of 

 man. 



There were, of course, many British evolutionists before 

 Darwin, amongst whom may be mentioned Charles Darwin's 

 grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, Wells, Patrick Matthew, 

 Pritchard, Grant, Herbert all these writers advocated, and 

 some even hinted at, natural selection. Above all, Robert 



