INTRODUCTORY 13 



By a remarkable coincidence, a young surgeon 

 named Alfred Russel Wallace — with Sir Joseph 

 Hooker, one of the two remaining survivors of those 

 epoch-making days — had also read the essay of 

 Malthus ; and, one day, as he lay prostrate with 

 malaria in the Malays, there occurred to him the 

 same idea as had occurred to Darwin. He sent 

 home a paper expressing it ; and this was shown 

 to Darwin, who was known to be working at the 

 subject. A joint paper was read, in both their 

 names, before the Linnrean Society in 1858. 



As in the case of Locke's immortal Essay, which 

 was forbidden to be read in his own University of 

 Oxford, and as in the still more noteworthy case of 

 Newton's great discovery, which was declared to lead 

 to atheism, but in far greater measure than in either 

 of these instances, the publication of Darwin's work 

 aroused an almost unprecedented exhibition of the 

 odium theologicum — an exhibition so extreme that 

 any student of the history of thought might almost 

 have been justified in inferring from it the truth, 

 and the magnitude of the truth, of Darwin's dis- 

 covery. 



Darwin himself was possessed of scant literary 

 power, and no taste for controversy. But good 

 fortune brought to his aid two trenchant lieutenants, 

 who more than supplied his deficiencies in this 

 respect. These were Ernst Haeckel of Jena, 1 and 

 Thomas Henry Huxley, whom Darwin addresses in 

 a letter as his " good and admirable agent for the 



1 Haeckel's great work, the " Anthropogenie," has recently been 

 revised by himself, and translated into English under the title of 

 " The Evolution of Man." (Messrs. Watts & Co.) 



