“connects together and renders intelligible a vast number of independent and hitherto unexplained facts. The natural system of arrangement of organic beings, their geographical distribution, their geological sequence, the phenomena of representative and substituted groups in all their modifications, and the most singular peculiarities of anatomical structure, are all explained and illustrated by it, in perfect accordance with the vast mass of facts which the researches of modern naturalists have brought together, and, it is believed, not materially opposed to any of them. It also claims a superiority over previous hypotheses, on the ground that it not merely explains, but necessitates what exists. Granted the law, and many of the most important facts in Nature could not have been otherwise, but are almost as necessary deductions from it, as are the elliptic orbits of the planets from the law of gravitation.” This important essay is dated by Wallace from Sarawak, Borneo, February, 1855. The conclusions remind us of the words Darwin wrote in his note-book in 1837. “Led to comprehend true affinities. My theory would give zest to recent and Fossil comparative Anatomy.” By his theory Darwin here means evolution and not natural selection, which was not discovered by him until the end of 1838. CHAPTER XIII. CANON TRISTRAM THE FIRST PUBLICLY TO ACCEPT THE THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION (1859). Although the historic meeting at the Linnean Society appeared to produce but little effect, one distinguished naturalist publicly accepted the theory of natural selection before the publication of “The Origin of Species,” and therefore as the direct result of Darwin’s and Wallace’s joint paper. This great distinction belongs to Canon Tristram, as Professor Newton has pointed out in his Presidential Address to the Biological Section of the British Association at Manchester in 1887 (“Reports,” p. 727), at the same time expressing the hope “that thereby the study of Ornithology may be said to have been lifted above its fellows.” [Sidenote: CANON TRISTRAM’S SUPPORT.] Canon Tristram’s paper, “On the Ornithology of Northern Africa” (Part iii., The Sahara, continued), was published in _The Ibis_, vol. i., October, 1859. The important conclusions alluded to above are contained at the end of the section upon the species of desert larks (pp. 429–433):