almost illegible--has been given to the world, and it proves
how completely Darwin had, at that early date, thought out the main
lines of his future _opus magnum_.

Darwin, however, had no idea of publishing his theory to the world until
he was able to support it by a great mass of facts and observations.
Lyell, again and again, warned him of the danger which he incurred of
being forestalled by other workers; while his brother Erasmus constantly
said to him, 'You will find that some one will have been before
you[126]!'

The utmost that Darwin could be persuaded to do, however, was to enlarge
his sketch of 1842 into one of 230 pages. This he did in the summer of
1844. His manner of procedure seems to have been that, keeping to the
same general arrangement of the matter as he had adopted in his original
sketch, he elaborated the arguments and added illustrations. Each of the
35 pages of the pencilled sketch, as it was dealt with, had a vertical
line drawn across it and was thrown aside. While the 'pencilled sketch'
of 1842 was little better than a collection of memoranda, which, though
intelligible to the writer at the time, are sometimes difficult either
to decipher or to understand the meaning of, the expanded work of 1844
was a much more connected and readable document, which Darwin caused to
be carefully copied out. The work was done in the summer months, while
he was absent from home, and unable therefore to refer to his abundant
notes--Darwin speaks of it, therefore, as 'done from memory.'

The two sketches, as Mr Francis Darwin points out, were each divided
into two distinct parts, though this arrangement is not adopted in the
_Origin of Species_, as finally published. Charles Darwin on many
occasions spoke of having adopted the _Principles of Geology_ as his
model. That work as we have seen consisted of a first portion
(eventually expanded from one to two volumes), in which the general
principles were enunciated and illustrated, and a second portion
(forming the third volume), in which those principles were applied to
deciphering the history of the globe in the past. I think that Darwin's
original intention was to follow a similar plan; the first part of his
work dealing with the evidences derived from the study of variation,
crossing, the struggle for existence, etc., and the second to the proofs
that natural selection had really operated as illustrated by the
geological record, by the facts of geographical di