HISTORICAL 43 
present time is merely historical, as showing the 
‘direction in which thought was tending in the earlier 
half of the nineteenth century. 
Before the ‘Origin of Species’ was published, 
A. R. Wallace communicated to Darwin a paper in 
which the bearing of the same idea was worked out at 
some length, and this paper was read, together with 
an abstract of Darwin’s own views, at a meeting of 
the Linnean Society in July, 1858. 
With this notice of other claimants to the idea of 
natural selection we may proceed to give an account 
of the theory as it is developed in the earlier chapters 
of the ‘ Origin of Species.’ 
We must first glance at Darwin’s method of using 
the term variation. Darwin applied this term to every 
kind of difference which is found to occur between 
parents and their offspring, or between members of 
the same family, no matter whether these differences_ 
were great or small. It has since been shown that a 
number of quite distinct phenomena were in this way 
regarded from a single standpoint, without a proper 
discrimination being made between them. But the 
differences between continuous and discontinuous 
variation, quantitative and qualitative variation, and 
the rest, were not pointed out until long subsequent to 
1859. Thus, beyond recognising a distinction between 
sports and individual differences, and attaching greater 
weight to the latter kind of changes, as being those 
which chiefly led to the origin of new species, Darwin 
made no further analysis of the facts of variation, but 
accepted all sorts of differences between individuals as 
