if there was any reticence at all in the matter, it was Mr. Darwin’s reticence during the long twenty years of study which intervened between the conception and the publication of his theory, which gave Mr. Wallace the chance of being an independent discoverer of the importance of natural selection.  And, finally, if it be recollected that Mr. Darwin’s and Mr. Wallace’s essays were published simultaneously in the Journal of the Linnaean Society for 1858, it follows that the Reviewer, while obliquely depreciating Mr. Darwin’s deserts, has in reality awarded to him a priority which, in legal strictness, does not exist.

Mr. Mivart, whose opinions so often concur with those of the Quarterly Reviewer, puts the case in a way, which I much regret to be obliged to say, is, in my judgment, quite as incorrect; though the injustice may be less glaring.  He says that the theory of natural selection is, in general, exclusively associated with the name of Mr. Darwin, “on account of the noble self-abnegation of Mr. Wallace.”  As I have said, no one can honour Mr. Wallace more than I do, both for what he has done and for what he has not done, in his relation to Mr. Darwin.  And perhaps nothing is more creditable to him than his frank declaration that he could not have written such a work as the “Origin of Species.”  But, by this declaration, the person most directly interested in the matter repudiates, by anticipation, Mr. Mivart’s suggestion that Mr. Darwin’s eminence is more or less due to Mr. Wallace’s modesty.

XI.

THE GENEALOGY OF ANIMALS.[1]

Considering that Germany now takes the lead of the world in scientific investigation, and particularly in biology, Mr. Darwin must be well pleased at the rapid spread of his views among some of the ablest and most laborious of German naturalists.

[Footnote 1:  “The Natural History of Creation.”  By Dr. Ernst Haeckel (Natuerliche Schoepfungs-Geschichte.—­Von Dr. Ernst Haeckel, Professor an der Universitaet Jena.) Berlin, 1868.]

Among those, Professor Haeckel, of Jena, is the Coryphaeus.  I know of no more solid and important contributions to biology in the past seven years than Haeckel’s work on the Radiolaria, and the researches of his distinguished colleague Gegenbaur, in vertebrate anatomy; while in Haeckel’s Generelle Morphologie there is all the force, suggestiveness, and, what I may term the systematizing power, of Oken, without his extravagance.  The Generelle Morphologie is, in fact, an attempt to put the doctrine of Evolution, so far as it applies to the living world, into a logical form; and to work out its practical applications to their final results.  The work before us, again, may be said to be an exposition of the Generelle Morphologie for an educated public, consisting, as it does, of the substance of a series of lectures delivered before a mixed audience at Jena, in the session 1867-8.