bestowed upon it when it was thus first given to the world—­that is to say, as twenty years is to one week.  For, he had already made it his own.  If the persuasion of his friends had prevailed with him, and he had published his theory after ten years’—­fifteen years’—­or even eighteen years’ elaboration of it—­I should have had no part in it whatever, and he would have been at once recognised as the sole and undisputed discoverer and patient investigator of this great law of “Natural Selection” in all its far-reaching consequences.

It was really a singular piece of good luck that gave to me any share whatever in the discovery.  During the first half of the nineteenth century (and even earlier) many great biological thinkers and workers had been pondering over the problem and had even suggested ingenious but inadequate solutions.  Some of these men were among the greatest intellects of our time, yet, till Darwin, all had failed; and it was only Darwin’s extreme desire to perfect his work that allowed me to come in, as a very bad second, in the truly Olympian race in which all philosophical biologists, from Buffon and Erasmus Darwin to Richard Owen and Robert Chambers, were more or less actively engaged.

And this brings me to the very interesting question:  Why did so many of the greatest intellects fail, while Darwin and myself hit upon the solution of this problem—­a solution which this Celebration proves to have been (and still to be) a satisfying one to a large number of those best able to form a judgment on its merits?  As I have found what seems to me a good and precise answer to this question, and one which is of some psychological interest, I will, with your permission, briefly state what it is.

On a careful consideration, we find a curious series of correspondences, both in mind and in environment, which led Darwin and myself, alone among our contemporaries, to reach identically the same theory.

First (and most important, as I believe), in early life both Darwin and myself became ardent beetle-hunters.  Now there is certainly no group of organisms that so impresses the collector by the almost infinite number of its specific forms, the endless modifications of structure, shape, colour, and surface-markings that distinguish them from each other, and their innumerable adaptations to diverse environments.  These interesting features are exhibited almost as strikingly in temperate as in tropical regions, our own comparatively limited island-fauna possessing more than 3,000 species of this one order of insects.

Again, both Darwin and myself had what he terms “the mere passion for collecting,” not that of studying the minutiae of structure, either internal or external.  I should describe it rather as an intense interest in the variety of living things—­the variety that catches the eye of the observer even among those which are very