THEORIES OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION 



in which it had been outlined by the author in a letter 

 to Asa Gray in the previous year an abstract which 

 was in Gray's hands before Wallace's paper was in ex- 

 istence. This joint production, together with a full 

 statement of the facts of the case, was presented to the 

 Linnaean Society of London by Hooker and Lyell on 

 the evening of July i, 1858, this being, by an odd co- 

 incidence, the twenty-first anniversary of the day on 

 which Darwin had opened his journal to collect 

 facts bearing on the "species question." Not often 

 before in the history of science has it happened 

 that a great theory has been nurtured in its au- 

 thor's brain through infancy and adolescence to its 

 full legal majority before being sent out into the 

 world. 



Thus the fuse that led to the great powder-mine had 

 been lighted. The explosion itself came more than a 

 year later, in November, 1859, when Darwin, after 

 thirteen months of further effort, completed the out- 

 line of his theory, which was at first begun 'as an ab- 

 stract for the Linnaean Society, but which grew to the 

 size of an independent volume despite his efforts at 

 condensation, and which was given that ever- to-be- 

 famous title, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural 

 Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the 

 Struggle for Life. And what an explosion it was ! The 

 joint paper of 1858 had made a momentary flare, caus- 

 ing the hearers, as Hooker said, to "speak of it with 

 bated breath," but beyond that it made no sensation. 

 What the result was when the Origin itself appeared 

 no one of our generation* need be told. The rumble 

 and roar that it made in the intellectual world have 



173 



