Wallace's paper was
in existence. This joint production, together with a full statement of
the facts of the case, was presented to the Linnaean Society of London
by Hooker and Lyell on the evening of July 1, 1858, this being, by an
odd coincidence, the twenty-first anniversary of the day on which
Darwin had opened his journal to collect facts bearing on the "species
question." Not often before in the history of science has it happened
that a great theory has been nurtured in its author's brain through
infancy and adolescence to its full legal majority before being sent out
into the world.

Thus the fuse that led to the great powder-mine had been lighted. The
explosion itself came more than a year later, in November, 1859, when
Darwin, after thirteen months of further effort, completed the outline
of his theory, which was at first begun as an abstract for the Linnaean
Society, but which grew to the size of an independent volume despite
his efforts at condensation, and which was given that ever-to-be-famous
title, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the
Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. And what an
explosion it was! The joint paper of 1858 had made a momentary flare,
causing the hearers, as Hooker said, to "speak of it with bated breath,"
but beyond that it made no sensation. What the result was when the
Origin itself appeared no one of our generation need be told. The rumble
and roar that it made in the intellectual world have not yet altogether
ceased to echo after more than forty years of reverberation.

NEW CHAMPIONS

To the Origin of Species, then, and to its author, Charles Darwin,
must always be ascribed chief credit for that vast revolution in the
fundamental beliefs of our race which has come about since 1859, and
which made the second half of the century memorable. But it must not be
overlooked that no such sudden metamorphosis could have been effected
had it not been for the aid of a few notable lieutenants, who rallied
to the standards of the leader immediately after the publication of the
Origin. Darwin had all along felt the utmost confidence in the ultimate
triumph of his ideas. "Our posterity," he declared, in a letter to
Hooker, "will marvel as much about the current belief (in special
creation) as we do about fossil shells having been thought to be created
as we now see them." But he fully realized that for the present success
of his theory of transmutation