Such being the general ferment in the minds of naturalists, it is no
wonder that they mustered strong in the rooms of the Linnaean Society,
on the 1st of July of the year 1858, to hear two papers by authors
living on opposite sides of the globe, working out their results
independently, and yet professing to have discovered one and the same
solution of all the problems connected with species. The one of these
authors was an able naturalist, Mr. Wallace, who had been employed for
some years in studying the productions of the islands of the Indian
Archipelago, and who had forwarded a memoir embodying his views to Mr.
Darwin, for communication to the Linnaean Society. On perusing the
essay, Mr. Darwin was not a little surprised to find that it embodied
some of the leading ideas of a great work which he had been preparing
for twenty years, and parts of which, containing a development of the
very same views, had been perused by his private friends fifteen or
sixteen years before. Perplexed in what manner to do full justice both
to his friend and to himself, Mr. Darwin placed the matter in the hands
of Dr. Hooker and Sir Charles Lyell, by whose advice he communicated a
brief abstract of his own views to the Linnaean Society, at the same
time that Mr. Wallace's paper was read. Of that abstract, the work on
the 'Origin of Species' is an enlargement; but a complete statement of
Mr. Darwin's doctrine is looked for in the large and well-illustrated
work which he is said to be preparing for publication.

The Darwinian hypothesis has the merit of being eminently simple and
comprehensible in principle, and its essential positions may be stated
in a very few words: all species have been produced by the development
of varieties from common stocks; by the conversion of these, first into
permanent races and then into new species, by the process of 'natural
selection', which process is essentially identical with that artificial
selection by which man has originated the races of domestic