selection. I do not believe that the theory of evolution would have made
its way so easily and so quickly after Darwin took up the cudgels in favour
of it, if he had not been able to support it by a principle which was
capable of solving, in a simple manner, the greatest riddle that living
nature presents to us,--I mean the purposiveness of every living form
relative to the conditions of its life and its marvellously exact
adaptation to these.

Everyone knows that Darwin was not alone in discovering the principle of
selection, and that the same idea occurred simultaneously and independently
to Alfred Russel Wallace. At the memorable meeting of the Linnean Society
on 1st July, 1858, two papers were read (communicated by Lyell and Hooker)
both setting forth the same idea of selection. One was written by Charles
Darwin in Kent, the other by Alfred Wallace in Ternate, in the Malay
Archipelago. It was a splendid proof of the magnanimity of these two
investigators, that they thus, in all friendliness and without envy, united
in laying their ideas before a scientific tribunal: their names will
always shine side by side as two of the brightest stars in the scientific
sky.

But it is with Charles Darwin that I am here chiefly concerned, since this
paper is intended to aid in the commemoration of the hundredth anniversary
of his birth.

The idea of selection set forth by the two naturalists was at the time
absolutely new, but it was also so simple that Huxley could say of it
later, "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that." As Darwin was
led to the general doctrine of descent, not through the labours of his
predecessors in the early years of the century, but by his own
observations, so it was in regard to the principle of selection. He was