Norton’s pagination

in entire independence of each other, and were constrained to accept the much-abused and almost discarded " transmutation hypothesis. " And both moreover reached independently, the same explanation of the process of derivation. This was obviously from their similar experiences as naturalists; from the force of the same obscure and puzzling facts which their studies of the geographical distributions of animals and plants had brought to their notice, though the Malthusian doctrine of [p. 99] population was, doubtless, the original source of their common theory. Mr. Darwin, in the Introduction to his later work on " The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, " attributes the beginnings of his speculations to the phenomena of the distributions of life over large continental areas, and in the islands of large archipelagos[sic], and especially refers to the curious phenomena of life in the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Mr. Wallace, in his first essay, originally published in 1855, four years earlier than " The Origin of Species, " refers to the same class of facts, and the same special facts in regard to the Galapagos Islands, as facts which demand the transmu-tation hypothesis for their sufficient explanation. While then much is to be credited to the sagacity and candor of these most accomplished travelers and observers in appreciating the force of obscure and previously little studied facts, yet their theoretical discussions of the hypothesis brought forward to explain them have been of still more importance in arousing an ever-increasing activity in the same field, and in creating a new and most stimulating interest in the external economy of life, – in the relations of living beings to the special conditions of their existence. And so the discussion is no longer closet work. It is no web woven from self-consuming brains, but a vast accumulation of related facts of observation, bound together by the bond of what must still be regarded as an hypothesis, – an hypothesis, however, which has no rival with any student of nature in whose mind reverence does not, in some measure, neutralize the aversion of the intellect to what is arbitrary. In anticipating the general acceptance of the doctrine which Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace have done so much to illustrate, we ought to except those philosophers who, from a severe, ascetic , and self-restraining temper, or from preoccupation with other researches, are disposed to regard such …