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INTRODUCTION.

in the same year he wrote to Mr. Wallace, "I infinitely admire and honour your zeal and courage in the good cause of Natural Science."

In February 1858 Mr. Wallace wrote an essay at Ternate, "On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the original Type," which proved to be the proximate cause of the publication of Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species." The manuscript of this paper was sent to Mr. Darwin, and reached him on June 18th, 1858, and the views it expressed coincided remarkably with those developed in Mr. Darwin's mind by many different lines of investigation. He proposed to get Mr. Wallace's consent to publish it as soon as possible; but on the urgent persuasion of Sir Joseph Hooker and Sir Charles Lyell, a joint communication of some extracts from a manuscript written by Mr. Darwin in 1839—1844, and a letter written by him to Professor Asa Gray of Boston, U.S., in 1857, together with Mr. Wallace's paper, was made to the Linnean Society on July Ist, 1858. As Sir Joseph Hooker wrote, "The interest excited was intense, but the subject was too novel and too ominous for the old school to enter the lists before armouring;" and there was no attempt at discussion. The further history of the "Origin of Species" controversy is well known, and has previously been sketched in the first volume of this library. ihat deserves repeating and emphasizing is that Mr. Wallace must rank as a completely independent and original discoverer of the essential feature of the "Origin of Species." Mr. Wallace originally termed his view one of progression and continued divergence. «This progression," he wrote in the Linnean essay, "by minute steps, in various directions, but always checked and balanced by the necessary conditions, subject to which alone existence can be preserved, may, it is believed, be followed out so as to agree with all the phenomena presented by organized beings, their extinction and succession in past ages, and all the extraordinary modifications of form, instinct, and habits which they exhibit." Nothing in scientific history. is more interesting or more admirable than the way in which the two great discoverers in biological evolution fully admired and recognized each other's independent work; and continued their intercourse through life untinged by any shadow of unworthy feeling. Mr. Darwin wrote to Mr Wallace on January 25th, 1859, " Most cordially do I wish you health and entire