It is curious that so much importance should be attached to this supplementary idea. It seems obvious that the theory of the origin of species by natural selection necessarily involves the divergence of the forms selected. An individual which varies, _ipso facto_ diverges from the type of its species; and its progeny, in which the variation becomes intensified by selection, must diverge still more, not only from the parent stock, but from any other race of that stock starting from, a variation of a different character. The selective process could not take place unless the selected variety was either better adapted to the conditions than the original stock, or adapted to other conditions than the original stock. In the first case, the original stock would be sooner or later extirpated; in the second, the type, as represented by the original stock and the variety, would occupy more diversified stations than it did before. The theory, essentially such as it was published fourteen years later, was written out in 1844, and Darwin was so fully convinced of the importance of his work, as it then stood, that he made special arrangements for its publication in case of his death. But it is a singular example of reticent fortitude, that, although for the next fourteen years the subject never left his mind, and during the latter half of that period he was constantly engaged in amassing facts bearing upon it from wide reading, a colossal correspondence, and a long series of experiments, only two or three friends were cognisant of his views. To the outside world he seemed to have his hands quite sufficiently full of other matters. In 1844, he published his observations on the volcanic islands visited during the voyage of the "Beagle." In 1845, a largely remodelled edition of his "Journal" made its appearance, and immediately won, as it has ever since held, the favour of both the scientific and the unscientific public. In 1846, the "Geological Observations in South America" came out, and this book was no sooner finished than Darwin set to work upon the Cirripedes. He was led to undertake this long and heavy task, partly by his desire to make out the relations of a very anomalous form which he had discovered on the coast of Chili; and partly by a sense of "presumption in accumulating facts and speculating on the subject of variation without having worked out my due share of species." (II. p. 31.) The eight or nine years of labour, which resulted in a monograph of first-rate importance in systematic zoology (to say nothing of such novel points as the discovery of complemental males), left Darwin no room to reproach himself on this score, and few will share his "doubt whether the work was worth the consumption of so much time." (I. p. 82.)