This discovery of Darwin's made it his duty to avow a view which was so unpopular that he felt as if he were about "confessing a murder." He was making "a big book" out of the facts he had collected, when a manuscript statement of conclusions like his own was sent him by Wallace, who had discovered independently the great fact of the survival of the fittest. Darwin wished at first to resign all claim to originality; but his friends insisted on his taking a share of the honour of the discovery. Accordingly an essay, which he had written in 1844, was read in company with that sent him by Wallace before the Linnaean Society, in London, on July 1, 1858. The importance of the new view was so well understood that the entire first edition, amounting to 1250 copies, of Darwin's _Origin of Species_, which book he wrote soon after, was sold on the day of publication, November 24, 1859. Other editions followed rapidly, with translations into many languages. No book of the century has been more revolutionary. II. Theologians still insisted on the supernatural creation of each species of plant or animal, and especially of the human race, in its final form. The inference that man had been developed by natural processes out of some lower animal, was easily drawn from the _Origin of Species_, though not expressly stated therein; and there was great alarm among the clergy. An Anglican bishop, who was nicknamed "Soapy Sam" on account of his subserviency to public opinion, declared in a leading quarterly that Darwin held views "absolutely incompatible" with the Bible, and tending to "banish God from nature." Other prominent Episcopalians called the new book "an attempt to dethrone God," and propagate infidelity. Cardinal Manning denounced the "brutal philosophy" which taught that "There is no God, and the ape is our Adam." Both Catholics and Protestants started anti-Darwinian societies in London, and, in 1863, Huxley saw "the whole artillery of the pulpit brought upon the doctrine of evolution and its supporters." The example of England was followed promptly by France and Germany. America was distracted by civil war; and her men of science were so few and timid that the denunciations of Darwinism which were prompted by the theological and metaphysical prejudices of Agassiz were generally accepted as final decisions. The position of the Unitarians and Transcendentalists may be judged from the fact that, during a period of nearly three years after the publication of the _Origin of Species_, nothing was said about Darwinism in the extremely liberal divinity school where I was then a student. Evolutionism had to look for advocates in America to Spiritualists like Denton or unbelievers like Underwood at that period.