The more serious result was that it accustomed
men's minds to a belief in evolution as in some form possible
or even probable. In this way it was provisionally of service.
Eight years later Herbert Spencer published an essay contrasting
the theories of creation and evolution--reasoning with great force
in favour of the latter, showing that species had undoubtedly been
modified by circumstances; but still only few and chosen men saw
the significance of all these lines of reasoning which had been
converging during so many years toward one conclusion.
On July 1, 1858, there were read before the Linnaean Society at
London two papers--one presented by Charles Darwin, the other by
Alfred Russel Wallace--and with the reading of these papers the
doctrine of evolution by natural selection was born. Then and there
a fatal breach was made in the great theological barrier of the
continued fixity of species since the creation.
The story of these papers the scientific world knows by heart: how
Charles Darwin, having been sent to the University of Cambridge to
fit him for the Anglican priesthood, left it in 1831 to go upon the
scientific expedition of the Beagle; how for five years he studied
with wonderful vigour and acuteness the problems of life as
revealed on land and at sea--among volcanoes and coral reefs, in
forests and on the sands, from the tropics to the arctic regions;
how, in the Cape Verde and the Galapagos Islands, and in Brazil,
Patagonia, and Australia he interrogated Nature with matchless
persistency and skill; how he returned unheralded, quietly settled
down to his work, and soon set the world thinking over its first
published results, such as his book on _Coral Reefs,_ and the
monograph on the _Cirripedia_; and, finally, how he presented his
paper, and followed it up with treatises which made him one of the
great leaders in the history of human thought.
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