This is bland, but peremptory.  Mr. Darwin implies that the mere asking of the question how species has come about opened up a field into which speculation itself had hardly yet ventured to intrude.  It was the mystery of mysteries; one of our greatest philosophers had said so; not one little feeble ray of light had ever yet been thrown upon it.  Mr. Darwin knew all this, and was appalled at the greatness of the task that lay before him; still, after he had pondered on what he had seen in South America, it really did occur to him, that if he was very very patient, and went on reflecting for years and years longer, upon all sorts of facts, good, bad, and indifferent, which could possibly have any bearing on the subject—­ and what fact might not possibly have some bearing?—­well, something, as against the nothing that had been made out hitherto, might by some faint far-away possibility be one day dimly seem.  It was only what he had seen in South America that made all this occur to him.  He had never seen anything about descent with modification in any book, nor heard any one talk about it as having been put forward by other people; if he had, he would, of course, have been the first to say so; he was not as other philosophers are; so the mountain went on for years and years gestating, but still there was no labour.

“My work,” continues Mr. Darwin, “is now nearly finished; but as it will take me two or three years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish this abstract.  I have been more especially induced to do this, as Mr. Wallace, who is now studying the natural history of the Malay Archipelago, has arrived at almost exactly the same general conclusions that I have on the origin of species.”  Mr. Darwin was naturally anxious to forestall Mr. Wallace, and hurried up with his book.  What reader, on finding descent with modification to be its most prominent feature, could doubt—­especially if new to the subject, as the greater number of Mr. Darwin’s readers in 1859 were—­that this same descent with modification was the theory which Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace had jointly hit upon, and which Mr. Darwin was so anxious to show that he had not been hasty in adopting?  When Mr. Darwin went on to say that his abstract would be very imperfect, and that he could not give references and authorities for his several statements, we did not suppose that such an apology could be meant to cover silence concerning writers who during their whole lives, or nearly so, had borne the burden and heat of the day in respect of descent with modification in its most extended application.  “I much regret,” says Mr. Darwin, “that want of space prevents my having the satisfaction of acknowledging the generous assistance I have received from very many naturalists, some of them personally unknown to me.”  This is like what the Royal Academicians say when they do not intend to hang our pictures; they can, however, generally find space for a picture if they want to