“I have been ... engaged in a very presumptuous work, and I know no one individual who would not say a very foolish one. I was so struck with the distribution of the Galapagos organisms, etc., and with the character of the American fossil mammifers[14], etc., that I determined to collect, blindly, every sort of fact, which could bear in any way on what are species.... At last, gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion that I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense[15] of a ‘tendency to progression,’ ‘adaptations from the slow willing of animals’, etc.! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so.” This last statement, as we shall see by reference to the “Origin of Species” was not wholly true. Another glimpse at the state of affairs in 1859 and the immediately succeeding years may be found in Darwin’s anxiety to convince Hooker, Lyell, and Huxley that species were variable and changeable, and his rejoicing when Huxley wrote out his very guarded acceptance of the Darwinian version of organic evolution. We find it hard to conceive of Huxley, the “warhorse of Darwinism” reluctantly agreeing to most of Darwin’s points, but at the same time voicing strong objections to others. And yet these very objections of Huxley’s, made in 1859, were in 1921 paraded before an audience at one of the country’s most famous universities as evidence against the truth of organic evolution! In France, even more than in England, the “Origin of Species” was held in disapproval. A translation of the book was offered to a noted publisher of Paris, and was unceremoniously refused. The country which had praised Cuvier, and ridiculed Lamarck and St.-Hilaire was not going to receive willingly the contributions of an iconoclastic Englishman. We are not surprised to find Darwin depressed by the European reception of his theories, and writing to Huxley: “Do you know of any good and speculative foreigners to whom it would be worth while to send my book?” But what was this “new” theory of evolution that so aroused the world? What were its characteristics, and how did if differ from the theories of Aristotle, Kant, Buffon, and Charles Darwin’s own grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin? The theory of evolution set forth in the “Origin of Species” contained three principal factors: (1) the constant variation of animals and plants, (2) the struggle for existence, and (3) the natural selection of those organisms which possess variations which are of value to them in their attempt to keep alive.