Publication of Darwin's theory
Thoughts on the possibility of transmutation of species which he recorded in 1836 towards the end of his five-year voyage on the Beagle were followed on his return by findings and work which led him to conceive of his theory in September 1838.
In the 1850s Darwin met Thomas Huxley, an ambitious naturalist who had returned from a long survey trip but lacked the family wealth or contacts to find a career and who joined the progressive group around Herbert Spencer fighting to make science a profession, freed from the clerics.
His geology books and publication of Beagle findings were completed in 1846, when he began what became eight years of research into classification of barnacle species, exploring the immense amount of variation in nature.
[4] In 1856 he was gradually bringing his friends round towards accepting evolution as a process, but was far from convincing them about the mechanism, when Wallace's entry into the discussion brought a new urgency to publication.
Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist working as a specimen collector in Borneo, spent Christmas 1854 visiting Sir James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak, then during the ensuing rainy season lived alone in a little Dayak house, with only one Malay servant as cook.
Wallace had also read the 1845 second edition of Darwin's Journal of Researches which hinted at evolution by describing the "wonderful relationship in the same continent" between fossil and extant species, which would "throw more light on the appearance of organic beings on our earth, and their disappearance from it, than any other class of facts".
[5][6] Wallace had also been impressed by Pictet's studies of palaeontology, and was now annoyed by a recent article by Edward Forbes which dismissed evolutionary ideas and instead proposed that species were created in a pattern showing a divine plan of polarity.
"[12] As Blyth had suggested earlier, Darwin wrote on 9 December to Edgar Leopold Layard in South Africa, and said that he was "collecting all the facts & reasoning which I could, in regard to the variation & origin of species", particularly pigeons.
[13] On 24 December Darwin wrote to the diplomat Sir Charles Murray in Persia, similarly saying he had "for many years been working on the perplexed subject of the origin of varieties & species, & for this purpose I am endeavouring to study the effects of domestication".
In November Darwin wrote to tell William Bernhardt Tegetmeier that a box of Persian poultry specimens from Murray had arrived, and "Mr Wallace is collecting in the Malay Archipelago".
"[18][19][20] On 1 May Lyell wrote to urge Darwin to establish priority: "I wish you would publish some small fragment of your data pigeons if you please & so out with the theory & let it take date—& be cited—& understood.
[22] Hooker's response encouraging publication was welcomed by Darwin, who thought his suggestion "that the Essay might supersede & take away all novelty & value from my future larger Book, is very true; & that would grieve me beyond everything.
His tenth child, Charles Waring Darwin was born on 6 December apparently without his full share of intelligence, renewing fears of inbreeding and hereditary defects, a topic that he covered in principle in his book.
[24] "I am got most deeply interested in my subject; though I wish I could set less value on the bauble fame, either present or posthumous, than I do, but not, I think, to any extreme degree; yet, if I know myself, I would work just as hard, though with less gusto, if I knew that my Book wd be published for ever anonymously".
[26] In July 1856 Darwin passed Huxley's remark on to Hooker with the comment, "What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!
Darwin pressed on with writing his "big book" on Natural Selection, overworking, until in March 1857 illness began cutting his working day "ridiculously short".
since I opened my first-note-book, on the question how & in what way do species & varieties differ from each other.— I am now preparing my work for publication, but I find the subject so very large, that though I have written many chapters, I do not suppose I shall go to press for two years."
He agreed with Wallace that "climatal conditions" had little effect, and wrote "It is really impossible to explain my views in the compass of a letter on the causes & means of variation in a state of nature; but I have slowly adopted a distinct & tangible idea.— Whether true or false others must judge".
[37] The young guard of naturalists were now putting the "mode of creation" openly on the agenda, even in addresses to the Geological Society, but Darwin wanted his case to be fully prepared.
He then apparently dropped the whole topic for some reason, possibly Charles Lyell's caution: the brief abstract Darwin sent to Asa Gray on 5 September made no mention of sexual selection or human evolution.
Wallace's idea of selection was the environment eliminating the unfit rather than cut-throat competition among individuals, and he took an egalitarian view of the Dayak natives he was among, while Darwin had seen the Fuegians as backwards savages, albeit capable of improvement.
It had come at a bad time, as his favourite retreat at Moor Spa was threatened by Lane being put on trial accused of adultery, and five days later Darwin's baby Charles Waring came down with scarlet fever.
[45] At the last minute, late in the evening of 30 June, Lyell and Hooker forwarded the Wallace and Darwin papers to the Secretary John Joseph Bennett, to be read at the meeting the next day.
He apparently disapproved, and in his annual presidential report presented in May 1859 wrote that "The year which has passed has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear".
[48] As might be expected, the joint paper alerted those subscribers who met the argument for the first time in print, and whose minds were prepared by prior struggles with the species question.
Alfred Newton, who held the chair in Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at Cambridge from 1866 to 1907, wrote this: "I sat up late that night to read it [the Linnean Society paper]; and never shall I forget the impression it made upon me.
He responded to Wallace's enquiry about what Lyell thought of the theory by saying that "I think he is somewhat staggered, but does not give in and speaks with horror [of] what a job it would be for the next edition of "The Principles" [of Geology] if he were "perverted".
Lyell was still struggling to come to terms with the idea of mankind, with immortal soul, originating from animals, but "Considering his age, his former views and position in society, I think his conduct has been heroic on the subject."
He struggled on despite rarely being able to write free of stomach pains for more than twenty minutes at a stretch, and made drastic revisions which left Murray with a huge £72 bill for corrections.
Darwin wrote "I have been very bad lately, having had an awful 'crisis' one leg swelled like elephantiasis – eyes almost closed up – covered with a rash & fiery Boils; but they tell me it will surely do me much good – it was like living in Hell."
