The more serious result was that it accustomed men's minds to a belief in evolution as in some form possible or even probable.

In this way it was provisionally of service.
Eight years later Herbert Spencer published an essay contrasting the theories of creation and evolution--reasoning with great force in favour of the latter, showing that species had undoubtedly been modified by circumstances; but still only few and chosen men saw the significance of all these lines of reasoning which had been converging during so many years toward one conclusion.
On July 1, 1858, there were read before the Linnaean Society at London two papers--one presented by Charles Darwin, the other by Alfred Russel Wallace--and with the reading of these papers the doctrine of evolution by natural selection was born.

Then and there a fatal breach was made in the great theological barrier of the continued fixity of species since the creation.
The story of these papers the scientific world knows by heart: how Charles Darwin, having been sent to the University of Cambridge to fit him for the Anglican priesthood, left it in 1831 to go upon the scientific expedition of the Beagle; how for five years he studied with wonderful vigour and acuteness the problems of life as revealed on land and at sea--among volcanoes and coral reefs, in forests and on the sands, from the tropics to the arctic regions; how, in the Cape Verde and the Galapagos Islands, and in Brazil, Patagonia, and Australia he interrogated Nature with matchless persistency and skill; how he returned unheralded, quietly settled down to his work, and soon set the world thinking over its first published results, such as his book on Coral Reefs, and the monograph on the Cirripedia; and, finally, how he presented his paper, and followed it up with treatises which made him one of the great leaders in the history of human thought.
The scientific world realizes, too, more and more, the power of character shown by Darwin in all this great career; the faculty of silence, the reserve of strength seen in keeping his great thought--his idea of evolution by natural selection--under silent study and meditation for nearly twenty years, giving no hint of it to the world at large, but working in every field to secure proofs or disproofs, and accumulating masses of precious material for the solution of the questions involved.
To one man only did he reveal his thought--to Dr.Joseph Hooker, to whom in 1844, under the seal of secrecy, he gave a summary of his conclusions.

Not until fourteen years later occurred the event which showed him that the fulness of time had come--the letter from Alfred Russel Wallace, to whom, in brilliant researches during the decade from 1848 to 1858, in Brazil and in the Malay Archipelago, the same truth of evolution by natural selection had been revealed.

Among the proofs that scientific study does no injury to the more delicate shades of sentiment is the well-known story of this letter.