gained much by my delay in publishing from about 1839, when the theory was clearly conceived, to 1859; and I lost nothing by it, for I cared very little whether men attributed more originality to me or to Wallace; and his essay no doubt aided in the reception of the theory.  I was forestalled in only one important point, which my vanity has always made me regret, namely, the explanation, by means of the Glacial period, of the presence of the same species of plants and of some few animals on distant mountain summits and in the arctic regions.  This view pleased me so much that I wrote it out in extenso, and I believe that it was read by Hooker some years before Edward Forbes published his celebrated memoir on the subject.  In the very few points in which we differed I still think that I was in the right.  I have never, of course, alluded in print to my having independently worked out this view.

Hardly any point gave me so much satisfaction, when I was at work on the Origin, as the explanation of the wide difference in many classes between the embryo and the adult animal, and of the close resemblance of the embryos within the same class.  No notice of this point was taken, as far as I remember, in the early reviews of the Origin, and I recollect expressing my surprise on this head in a letter to Asa Gray.  Within late years several reviewers have given the whole credit to Fritz Mueller and Haeckel, who undoubtedly have worked it out much more fully and in some respects more correctly than I did.  I had materials for a whole chapter on the subject, and I ought to have made the discussion longer; for it is clear that I failed to impress my readers; and he who succeeds in doing so deserves, in my opinion, all the credit.

This leads me to remark that I have almost without exception been treated honestly by my reviewers, passing over those without scientific knowledge as not worthy of notice.  My views have often been grossly misrepresented, bitterly opposed and ridiculed, but this has been generally done, as I believe, in good faith.  On the whole I do not doubt that my works have been repeatedly and greatly overpraised.  I rejoice that I have avoided controversies, and this I owe to Lyell, who many years ago, in reference to my geological works, strongly advised me never to get entangled in a controversy, as it rarely did any good and caused a miserable loss of time and temper.

Whenever I have found out that I have blundered, or that my work has been imperfect, and when I have been contemptuously criticised, and even when I have been overpraised, so that I have felt mortified, it has been my greatest comfort to say hundreds of times to myself that “I have worked as hard and as well as I could, and no man can do more than this.”  I remember when in Good Success Bay, in Terra del Fuego, thinking (and I believe that I wrote home to that effect) that I could not employ my life better than in adding a little to natural science.  This I have done to the best of my abilities, and critics may say what they like, but they cannot destroy this conviction.