THEORIES OF EVOLUTION. 
An Historical Outline. 
AGNES ROBERTSON, D.Sc. 
(Continued from page 171.) 
IIl.—NATURAL SELECTION. 
We must now turn to the most famous theory ever brought 
forward to account for the origin of species—that of Natural 
Selection or the Survival of the Fittest, which was propounded 
independently by Darwin and Wallace. Charles Darwin (1809- 
1882) was the son of a doctor, and the grandson of Erasmus 
Darwin, whose evolutionary views we have already mentioned. 
His intellectual development was not rapid; at Cambridge he 
merely took the poll degree, and he says of himself at the age 
of twenty-two, ‘I should have thought myself mad to give up 
the first days of partridge-shooting for geology or any other 
science.’ Charles Darwin is, in fact, a most striking instance 
of the truth of Keats’ saying—‘ Nothing is finer for the purposes 
of great productions than a very gradual ripening of the intel- 
lectual powers.’ He always had a taste for collecting, and at 
Cambridge he came under the influence of Professor Henslow, 
with whom he went for long walks and discussed natural 
history. Through Henslow, soon after he went down from 
Cambridge, he received the offer of the position of naturalist 
on H.M.S. Beagle, then just starting for Tierra del Fuego 
and the East Indies with a view to surveying the southern 
extremity of America. He closed with the offer, and these 
travel years had a most profound effect on his after-life. On 
the voyage he began to reflect on the problem of the origin of 
species, and after his return home, in the summer of 1837, he 
opened his first note-book on the subject, a subject at which he 
worked continuously for the next twenty years. Curiously 
enough, in 1858 Alfred Russel Wallace, who was studying the 
natural history of the Malay Archipelago, sent him an essay he 
had just written embodying the identical idea which he had him- 
self reached, namely, that of Natural Selection! Darwin, by the 
advice of his friends, published some extracts from his existing 
manuscripts with Wallace’s paper, and the next year saw the 
appearance of the first edition of the ‘Origin of Species.’ It 
is a lasting honour to English science that, instead of the 
1907 June 1. 
O 
