coveries) were found from
time to time not a few enemies of the true healing art, and obstinate
defenders of many forms of quackery. Wallace made no claim to be an
original investigator. He knew his limitations, and said again and again
that he could not have conducted the slow and minute researches or have
accumulated the vast amount of detailed evidence to which Darwin, with
infinite patience, devoted his life. He was genuinely glad that it had
not fallen to his lot to write "The Origin of Species." He felt that his
chief faculty was to reason from facts which others discovered. Yet he
had that original insight and creative faculty which enabled him to see,
often as by flashlight, the explanation which had remained hidden from
the eyes of the man who was most familiar with the particular facts, and
he elaborated it with quickening pulse, anxious to put down the whole
conception which filled his mind lest some portion of it should escape
him. Therein lay one secret of his great genius. He often said that he
was an idler, but we know that he was a patient and industrious worker.
His idleness was his way of describing his long musings, waiting the
bidding of her whom God inspires--Truth, who often hides her face from
the clouded eyes of man. For hours, days, weeks, he was disinclined to
work. He felt no constraining impulse, his attention was relaxed or
engaged upon a novel, or his seeds, or the plan of a new house, which
always excited his interest. Then, apparently suddenly, whilst in one of
his day-dreams, or in a fever (as at Ternate, to recall the historical
episode when the theory of Natural Selection struck him), an
explanation, a theory, a discovery,[68] the plan of a new book, came to
him like a flash of light, and with the plan the material, the
arguments, the illustrations; the words came tumbling one over the
other in his brain, and as suddenly his idleness vanished, and work,
eager, prolonged, unwearying, filled his days and months and years until
the message was written down and the task fully accomplished. Whilst
writing he referred to few books, but wrote straight on, adding
paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter, without recasting or
revision.[69] And the result was fresh, striking, original. It was a
creation. The work being done, he relapsed into his busy idleness. The
truth, as he saw it, seemed to come to him. Some people called him a
prophet, but he was not conscious of that high calling. I do not