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He was desperately aware of his own anguish at losing priority, but he was equally clear that, in terms of discovery, he had got there first. Meanwhile he was obsessed by the cataclysm of Wallace’s letter. In front of him two of his children were mortally ill. Very likely it was scarlet fever, which Darwin knew had just killed three children in the village, while others were ‘at death’s door, with terrible suffering’.ĭarwin hardly knew which way to look. Then, suddenly, the baby of the family, Charles Waring, aged 18 months, grew hot and feverish with an intensity that terrified Charles and Emma. On the very day Wallace’s letter arrived, one of the daughters, Etty, was taken seriously ill with diphtheria. Darwin saw with horrible clarity that he was to be the midwife of an idea, rather than its parent. For Wallace had written to Darwin with the express hope that he would look over the essay and, if he thought it had merit, send it to Lyell.

Moreover, this younger man had entrusted the manuscript into Darwin’s hands as a safe conduit for publication. An idea he thought was his, and his alone, now turned out to be shared with another and much younger man. If Wallace had my MS sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters.’ ‘So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed,’ he wailed to Lyell.ĭarwin was caught in a vice. Wallace had written an article on natural selection, ready for publication, while Darwin, lost in his book, was still silent.Īmong the many ideas contained in the article – and expressed with notable lucidity – Darwin read the following: ‘If … any species should produce a variety having slightly increased powers of preserving existence, that variety must inevitably in time acquire a superiority in numbers … and occupy the place of the extinct species and variety.’ As Darwin put it, writing at once to Lyell for advice, ‘Your words have come true with a vengeance that I should be forestalled … I never saw a more striking coincidence. The implications were clear and they were horrifying. Word for word, it seemed, Wallace had laid out the principles of Darwin’s ideas. The title alone was alarming enough to a man who thought he had a monopoly on the proper study of evolution. The author was a collector he knew slightly: Alfred Russel Wallace. It was entitled, ‘On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type’. Inside he found an essay about the origin of species. One morning Darwin opened a letter postmarked as coming from the Malay Archipelago. Then, in June 1858, a crisis intervened which caused an acceleration of his plans and put him into the hands of John Murray, one of the nation’s most accomplished and efficient publishers. No short article had appeared instead, stubbornly, he was bent on compiling an enormous work – a multi-volume project that looked set to occupy him for years. Two years later, in 1858, Darwin, now aged 49, was still faltering. It was time to publish time to release his theory to the world. Even Darwin’s geological hero, Charles Lyell, could see the strength of Darwin’s theory and, in 1856, he warned that there were other scientists thinking about the origin of the species, and they might claim the glory. Botanist Joseph Hooker, a frequent guest at Darwin's Down House and a stalwart of his correspondence, was completely convinced. By 1854 Darwin had finished work on a project about barnacles and was ready to publish on the subject of evolution. However, for fifteen years this work remained in the background to his main occupation of writing on geology and publishing expert reports on the Beagle collections. His research included extensive experimental selective breeding of plants and animals, finding evidence that species were not fixed and investigating many detailed ideas to refine and substantiate his theory. After his return to the UK, Darwin had the framework of his theory of natural selection by which to work.