In 1864 nine eminent scientists, who had long been intimate friends, formed a dining club in order to prevent their drifting apart due to their various duties, and in order to further the cause of science. The club, which acquired the title of “X Club”, held monthly meetings from October to June, and was extremely active for two decades, but then gradually lessened in vitality. It served as a highly significant fraternity of scientists, and the regular communication which it afforded (...) helped the members to marshall their efforts on behalf of science against what they felt to be the obstructionist activities and ideas of conservative scientists, certain theologians, and non-scientific society figures. (shrink)

h e Darwinian hypothesis has the merit of being eminently simple and comprehensible in principle, and its essential positions may be stated in a very few words: all species have been produced by the development of varieties from common stocks; by the conversion of these, first into permanent races and then into new species, by the process of natural selection , which process is essentially identical with that artificial selection by which man has originated the races of domestic animals—the struggle (...) for existence taking the place of man, and exerting, in the case of natural selection, that selective action which he performs in artificial selection. (shrink)