Frankly to recognise these various foreshadowings of the distinctive Darwinian theory of natural selection is not in any way to undermine the foundations of Charles Darwin's own real and exceptional greatness. On the contrary, the mere fact that his views were so far anticipated by Wells, Matthew, Spencer, and others, and were simultaneously arrived at across half the globe by the independent intellect of Alfred Russel Wallace, is in itself the very best proof and finest criterion of Charles Darwin's genuine apostleship. No truly grand and fruitful idea was ever yet the sole property of a single originator. Great discoveries, says an acute critic, must always be concerned with some problem of the time which many of the world's foremost minds are just then cudgelling their active brains about. It was so with the discovery of the differential calculus, and of the planet Neptune; with the interpretation of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and of the cuneiform inscriptions; with the undulatory theory of light, with the mechanical equivalent of heat, with the doctrine of the correlation and conservation of energies, with the invention of the steam engine, the locomotive, the telegraph and the telephone; with the nebular hypothesis, and with spectrum analysis. It was so, too, with the evolutionary movement. The fertile upturning of virgin sod in the biological field which produced Darwin's forerunners, as regards the idea of descent with modification, in the persons of Buffon, Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin, necessarily produced a little later, under the fresh impetus of the Malthusian conception, his forerunners or coadjutors, as regards the idea of natural selection, in the persons of Wells, Matthew, and Wallace. It was Darwin's task to recognise the universal, where Wells and Spencer had seen only the particular; to build up a vast and irresistible inductive system, where Matthew and Wallace had but thrown out a pregnant hint of wonderful _a priori_ interest and suggestiveness. It is one thing to draw out the idea of a campaign, another thing to carry it to a successful conclusion; one thing rudely to sketch a ground-plan, another thing finally to pile aloft to the sky the front of an august and imposing fabric. As soon as the papers at the Linnean had been read and printed, Darwin set to work in real earnest to bring out the first instalment of his great work. That instalment was the 'Origin of Species.' The first edition was ready for the public on November the 24th, 1859.