20 FIFTY YEARS OF DARWINISM 



and patient student, seeking ever the full demonstration 

 of the truth he had discovered, rather than to achieve 

 immediate personal fame. 



" Such being the actual facts of the case, I should 

 have had no cause for complaint if the respective shares 

 of Darwin and myself in regard to the elucidation of 

 nature's method of organic development, had been 

 thenceforth estimated as being, roughly, proportional to 

 the time we had each bestowed upon it when it was 

 thus first given to the world — that is to say, as twenty 

 years is to one week. For, he had already made it his 

 own. If the persuasion of his friends had prevailed with 

 him, and he had published his theory after ten years', 

 fifteen years', or even eighteen years' elaboration of it, 

 I should have had no part in it whatever, and he would 

 have been at once recognized, and should be ever recog- 

 nized, as the sole and imdisputed discoverer and patient 

 investigator of the great law of ' Natural Selection ' 

 in all its far-reaching consequences. 



" It was really a singular piece of good luck that 

 gave me any share whatever in the discovery ... it 

 was only Darwin's extreme desire to perfect his work 

 that allowed me to come in, as a very bad second, in the 

 truly Olympian race in which all philosophical biologists, 

 from Buffon and Erasmus Darwin to Richard Owen and 

 Robert Chambers were more or less actively engaged." 



ECHOES OF THE STORM 



It is impossible to do more than refer briefly 

 to the storm of opposition with which the Origin 

 was at first received. The reviewer in the Athe- 

 nasum for November 19, 1859, left the author 

 " to the mercies of the Divinity Hall, the Col- 

 lege, the Lecture Room, and the Museum."* 

 Dr. Whewell for some years refused to allow a 



' Life and Letters, II, p. 228 n. 



