CELEBES, THE MOLUCCAS, ETC. 363 



The same evening I did this pretty fully, and on the two suc- 

 ceeding evenings wrote it out carefully in order to send it to 

 Darwin by the next post, which would leave in a day or two. 



I wrote a letter to him in which I said that I hoped the 

 idea would be as new to him as it was to me, and that it 

 would supply the missing factor to explain the origin of 

 species. I asked him if he thought it sufficiently important 

 to show to Sir Charles Lyell, who had thought so highly of 

 my former paper. 



The subsequent history of this article is fully given in the 

 " Life and Letters," volume ii., and I was, of course, very 

 much surprised to find that the same idea had occurred to 

 Darwin, and that he had already nearly completed a large 

 work fully developing it. The paper is reprinted in my 

 " Natural Selection and Tropical Nature," and in reading it 

 now it must be remembered that it was but a hasty first sketch, 

 that I had no opportunity of revising it before it was printed 

 in the journal of the Linnaean Society, and, especially, that 

 at that time nobody had any idea of the constant variability 

 of every common species, in every part and organ, which has 

 since been proved to exist. Almost all the popular objec- 

 tions to Natural Selections are due to ignorance of this fact, 

 and to the erroneous assumption that what are called " fav- 

 ourable variations" occur only rarely, instead of being abun- 

 dant, as they certainly are, in every generation, and quite large 

 enough for the efficient action of " survival of the fittest " in 

 the improvement of the race. 



During the first months of my residence at Ternate I 

 made two visits to different parts of the large island of Gilolo, 

 where my hunters obtained a number of very fine birds, but 

 owing to the absence of good virgin forest and my own ill- 

 health, I obtained very few insects. At length, on March 25, 

 I obtained a passage to Dorey Harbour, on the north coast 

 of New Guinea, in a trading schooner, which left me there, 

 and called for me three or four months later to bring me 

 back to Ternate. I was the first European who had lived 

 alone on this great island; but partly owing to an accident 



