supporters of the special creation hypothesis had not, now and then, an
uneasy consciousness that all was not right, their position seemed more
impregnable than ever, if not by its own inherent strength, at any rate by
the obvious failure of all the attempts which had been made to carry it. On
the other hand, however much the few, who thought deeply on the question of
species, might be repelled by the generally received dogmas, they saw no
way of escaping from them save by the adoption of suppositions so little
justified by experiment or by observation as to be at least equally
distasteful.

The choice lay between two absurdities and a middle condition of uneasy
scepticism; which last, however unpleasant and unsatisfactory, was
obviously the only justifiable state of mind under the circumstances.

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