It is impossible, indeed, to overrate the importance of Malthus, viewed as a schoolmaster to bring men to Darwin, and to bring Darwin himself to the truth. Without the 'Essay on the Principle of Population' it is quite conceivable that we should never have had the 'Origin of Species' or the 'Descent of Man.'
At the same time, Darwin had not been idle in other departments of scientific work. Side by side with his collections for his final effort he had been busy on his valuable treatise upon Coral Reefs, in which he proved, mainly from his own observations on the Keeling archipelago, that atolls owe their origin to a subsidence of the supporting ocean-floor, the rate of upward growth of the reefs keeping pace on the whole with the gradual depression of the sea-bottom. 'No more admirable example of scientific method,' says Professor Geikie forty years later, 'was ever given to the world; and even if he had written nothing else, this treatise alone would have placed Darwin in the very front of investigators of nature.' But, from our present psychological and historical point of view, as a moment in the development of Darwin's influence, and therefore of the evolutionary impulse in general, it possesses a still greater and more profound importance, because the work in which the theory is unfolded forms a perfect masterpiece of thorough and comprehensive inductive method, and gained for its author a well-deserved reputation as a sound and sober scientific inquirer. The acquisition of such a reputation, afterwards increased by the publication of the monograph on the Family Cirripedia (in 1851), proved of immense use to Charles Darwin in the fierce battle which was to rage around the unconscious body of the 'Origin of Species.' To be 'sound' is everywhere of incalculable value; to have approved oneself to the slow and cautious intelligence of the Philistine classes is a mighty spear and shield for a strong man; but in England, and above all in scientific England, it is absolutely indispensable to the thinker who would accomplish any great revolution. Soundness is to the world of science what respectability is to the world of business--the _sine qua non_ for successfully gaining even a hearing from established personages.