DARWIN'S THEORY 13 



to invent. Thus Wallace speaks of the "struggle for 

 existence," whilst Darwin had used the term " struggle for 

 life." Darwin had been urged by his friends before this 

 to publish an abstract or statement of his conclusions, but 

 now that he had received Wallace's manuscript, he de- 

 clared in a letter to Hooker, " I would far rather burn my 

 whole book than that he or any other man should think 

 that I had behaved in a paltry spirit." And so Lyell and 

 Hooker took the matter in hand, and communicated to 

 the Linnean Society, accompanied by an explanatory 

 statement, the two independent papers, setting forth, as 

 they say, " the results of the investigations of the in- 

 defatigable naturalists, Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. 

 Alfred Wallace." Such loyalty and regard to each other 

 as Darwin and Wallace showed then and ever after form 

 a delightful feature in the history of this great discovery. 

 A wonderful thing is that Hooker, now Sir Joseph Hooker, 

 the greatest botanist of the past century, the constant 

 friend and comrade of Darwin, is still alive, and that 

 Alfred Russel Wallace, too, is still with us. They both 

 were present when the Linnean Society celebrated the 

 meeting of fifty years ago. 



The views of Darwin and Wallace have now become 

 the established doctrine of science. They have led to the 

 universal recognition of " the origin of species by descent 

 with modification." That is a statement, in other words, 

 to the effect that all the various kinds of living things 

 have been gradually produced by natural birth from pre- 

 decessors which differ from them only slightly in the later 

 stages of time, but become simpler and less like their 

 descendants as we go further back, until we reach the 

 simplest living things. It has led to the conviction that 

 there has been no exceptional or " miraculous " suspension 

 of the order of Nature in this process, but that all has 

 come about in due and regular course, in virtue of the 



