ticism; 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 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 animals--the
_struggle for existence_ taking the place of man, and exerting, in the
case of natural selection, that selective action which he performs in
artificial selection.

The evidence brought forward by Mr. Darwin in support of his hypothesis
is of three kinds. First, he endeavours to prove that species may be
origina