46 HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURES 



In June, 1842, he wrote a brief account of the 

 theory, and two years later an essay; but he could 

 not be induced to publish until, on June 18, 1858, 

 almost exactly twenty years after the conception 

 first came to him, he received a manuscript essay 

 written by A. R. Wallace in the Moluccas " On 

 the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely 

 from the Original Type." Darwin placed him- 

 self in the hands of his friends Lyell and Hooker, 

 who asked for an abstract of his own work, and 

 presented it, with Wallace's essay, to the Linnean 

 Society on July i, 1858. Now that we knew the 

 circumstances under which Wallace wrote his 

 essay, the coincidence was far more striking. He 

 also was convinced of evolution, and had written 

 a powerful paper in support of it. But he knew 

 of no motive cause until, in February, 1858, lying 

 ill of fever in Ternate, he began to think of 

 Malthus's book, and the idea of natural selection 

 instantly flashed across his mind He did not 

 wait twenty years. In two hours he had thought 

 out almost the whole of the theory, in three even- 

 ings he had finished it, and sent it to Darwin. 

 Thus on July i, 1858, when Darwin was nearly 

 fifty and Huxley just over thirty-three, the great 

 theory was before the world, and the most striking 

 thing about Huxley in relation to it was the fact 

 that he knew nothing about it. Almost exactly 

 a year after the appearance of the paper, on June 

 25, 1859, he wrote to Lyell in favour of the trans- 

 mutation of species, but against the idea of 



