latter, showing that species had undoubtedly been modified by
circumstances; but still only few and chosen men saw the significance
of all these lines of reasoning which had been converging during so many
years toward one conclusion.

On July 1, 1858, there were read before the Linnaean Society at London
two papers--one presented by Charles Darwin, the other by Alfred Russel
Wallace--and with the reading of these papers the doctrine of evolution
by natural selection was born. Then and there a fatal breach was made in
the great theological barrier of the continued fixity of species since
the creation.

The story of these papers the scientific world knows by heart: how
Charles Darwin, having been sent to the University of Cambridge to
fit him for the Anglican priesthood, left it in 1831 to go upon the
scientific expedition of the Beagle; how for five years he studied with
wonderful vigour and acuteness the problems of life as revealed on
land and at sea--among volcanoes and coral reefs, in forests and on the
sands, from the tropics to the arctic regions; how, in the Cape Verde
and the Galapagos Islands, and in Brazil, Patagonia, and Australia
he interrogated Nature with matchless persistency and skill; how he
returned unheralded, quietly settled down to his work, and soon set the
world thinking over its first published results, such as his book on
Coral Reefs, and the monograph on the Cirripedia; and, finally, how he
presented his paper, and followed it up with treatises which made him
one of the great leaders in the history of human thought.

The scientific world realizes, too, more and more, the power of
character shown by Darwin in all this great career; the faculty of
silence, the reserve of strength seen in keeping his great thought--his
idea of evolution by natural selection--under silent study and
meditation for nearly twenty years, giving no hint of it to the world
at large, but working in every field to secure proofs or disproofs,
and accumulating masses of precious material for the solution of the
questions involved.

To one man only did he reveal his thought--to Dr. Joseph Hooker, to
whom in 1844, under the seal of secrecy, he gave a summary of his
conclusions. Not until fourteen years later occurred the event which
showed him that the fulness of time had come--the letter from Alfred
Russel Wallace, to whom, in brilliant researches during the decade from
1848 to 1858, in Brazil and in the Malay Archipelago