Editing Development of Darwin's theory (section)

==Renewal of work on Species==
By September 1854 his second volume of ''Barnacles'' had been printed and dispatched, and he turned his attention to Species, telling his cousin [[William Darwin Fox]] that he planned to "view all facts that I can master..to see how far they favour or are opposed to the notion that wild species are mutable or immutable". All available information was examined for "hostile facts" and discussed with Hooker, who had resisted what he called Darwin's "Elastic theory" but who was now developing an "utter disbelief of my own Genera and species".

In the Spring of 1855, as the [[Crimean War]] developed, Darwin was pondering the war of nature, taking the then current analogy with an industrial economy further than others, and wondering how species spread. He was dismissive of the ideas that others had put forward of sunken continents like [[Atlantis]], and began experimenting in his house with soaking seeds in [[brine]] then seeing if they could germinate. He reported his results in ''Gardeners' Chronicle'' and roped in his curate friends including Henslow. The consul in [[Norway]] sent seed pods which had washed ashore. Hooker was able to identify them as coming from the [[Caribbean]] and get them to germinate at Kew. Investigation of variation brought him back to [[animal husbandry]]. He now began dissecting domestic animals and breeding [[pigeon]]s, joining a pigeon fancier's club: very unorthodox behaviour for naturalists at that time.

Huxley had obtained a position and his friends had been having an impact on the establishment. In particular Huxley had strongly dismissed the transmutationist thesis of Chambers' ''Vestiges''. He also argued vociferously against the dominant Owen who had demonstrated fossil evidence of an evolutionary sequence of horses as supporting his idea of development from archetypes in "ordained continuous becoming", and who had in 1854 given a [[British Association for the Advancement of Science|British Association]] talk on the impossibility of bestial apes such as the recently discovered [[gorilla]] standing erect and being transmuted into men. Darwin tried at a gathering at Downe on 22 April 1856 to amiably argue Huxley and Hooker round towards accepting evolution as a process, without going into the mechanism.

Darwin intended to write human beings into ''Natural Selection'' through mid-1857. But his work required a tremendous amount of evidence and facts. He left humans out in part because "[[Indian Rebellion of 1857|mutiny in India]]" had stopped his correspondence with [[Edward Blyth]] in Calcutta. Had he included [[sexual selection]], at that time it would have been only the male competition element and not female choice.<ref>{{harvnb|Moore|Desmond|2004|pp=xxxi–xxxiii}}</ref>