NATURAL SELECTION 47 



transition between species. The letter showed 

 that he had no notion of natural selection, but 

 only of changes wrought by external conditions, 

 changes sudden and sharply marked off, like those 

 which follow the replacement of one chemical 

 element by another in a compound to use his 

 own metaphor. ' The Origin of Species " was 

 published in November, 1859, and an advance 

 copy was sent by Darwin to Huxley. In his 

 chapter on the reception of " The Origin of 

 Species " (" Life and Letters of Charles Darwin," 

 Vol. II) Huxley said : " My reflections when I 

 first made myself master of the central idea of 

 the ' Origin ' was how extremely stupid not to 

 have thought of that " further evidence that he 

 had known nothing of the details of the Linnean 

 Society paper, where the central idea was admir- 

 ably, although, of course, briefly, explained by its 

 discoverers. 



Huxley's want of knowledge of natural selec- 

 tion in the interval between July i, 1858, and the 

 end of November, 1859, suggested several inter- 

 esting reflections. Great and original workers 

 rarely had the time for wide reading in their sub- 

 ject away from the lines of their special investiga- 

 tions. They were also held back by the feeling 

 that the attempt to be encyclopaedic was itself 

 destructive of originality ; and yet there was noth- 

 ing so inspiring to a young worker as the fact that 

 his attempts had interested a great and original 

 leader in his own subject. The position looked 



