tend to be preserved,
and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result would be the formation
of new species.

It was not until June, 1842, however, that Darwin allowed himself the
satisfaction of writing a very brief abstract of his theory in
thirty-five pages. This was enlarged two years later into one of 230
pages. Early in 1856, Sir Charles Lyell, the well-known geologist,
advised him to write out his views upon the subject fully, and Darwin
began to do so on a scale three or four times as extensive as that which
was afterwards followed in his "Origin of Species." He got through about
half the work on this scale. His plans were overthrown, owing to the
curious circumstance that, in the summer of 1858, Mr. Alfred E. Wallace,
who was then in the Malay archipelago, sent him an essay "On the
Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type." It
turned out upon perusal that this essay contained exactly the same
theory as that which Darwin was engaged in elaborating. Mr. Wallace
expressed the wish that, if Darwin thought well of the essay, he should
send it to Lyell. It was Sir Charles Lyell and Sir Joseph Hooker who
insisted that Darwin should allow an abstract from his manuscript,
together with a letter to Prof. Asa Gray, dated Sept. 5, 1857, to be
published at the same time with Wallace's essay. Darwin was unwilling to
take this course, being then unacquainted with Mr. Wallace's generous
disposition. As a matter of fact, the joint productions excited very
little attention, and the only published notice of them asserted that
what was new in them was false, and that what was true was old. From the
indifference evinced to the papers which first propounded the theory of
natural selection, Darwin drew the inference that it is necessary for
any new view to be explained at considerable length in order to obtain
the public ear.

In September, 1858, Darwin, at the earnest advice of Lyell and Hooker,
set to work to prepare a volume on the transmutation of species. The
book cost him more than thirteen months' hard labor. It was published in
November, 1859, under the title of "Origin of Species." This, which
Darwin justly regarded as the chief work of his life, was from the first
highly successful. The first edition was sold on the day of publication,
and the book was presently translated into almost every European tongue.
Darwin himself attributed the success of the "Origin" in large part to
his having previ