gan work on a scale that would have resulted in three or four volumes the sizes of the Origin of Species. The project was brought to a sudden halt, however, when in 1858 Alfred Russell Wallace, then a young man living in the Malay Archipelago, sent Darwin a manuscript entitled On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type. The matter was placed before Lyell and Hooker, who advised that, inasmuch as Darwin had been at work on his theory of species long before Wallace, it was only fair that steps should be taken to give proper credit for his pioneer work. Darwin objected to this, and was willing to leave Wallace the entire field, but his friends would not hear to it.
As a result of their persuasion, Lyell and Hooker sponsored the publication, in the Journal of the Linnean Society for June 30, 1858 a group of papers, including two short ones by by Darwin[1] and Wallace's essay. With these went a statement as to the work done by each author, establishing clearly the priority of Darwin. The papers, however, did not attract much attention, for Darwin says, "… the only published notice of them which I can remember was by Professor Haughton of Dublin, whose verdict was that all that was new in them false, and what was true was old."
In spite of the great similarity of ideas, as
- ↑ One of these papers was a mere extract from Darwin's larger manuscript; the other was an abstract of a letter to Dr. Asa Gray, an American botanist. The whole took up a little more than six pages.
