Sometime in June of the year 1858, Charles Robert Darwin received a letter from Alfred Russell Wallace. Wallace was writing from the Malay archipelago; he enclosed a paper that he asked Darwin to help him get published. The paper outlined evolution by natural selection. Darwin panicked. Since his return from South America in 1836 he had thought of little else, but had published nothing. In a letter to a friend, he wrote: "all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed."
What happened next is well known. Darwin consulted his friends, Joseph Hooker, and Charles Lyell. He offered to stand aside and allow Wallace to publish alone, but the two men dissuaded him. Instead, they arranged for Darwin and WallaceΓÇÖs papers to be presented jointly at a meeting of the Linnean Society where they were read out on 1 July 1858 and published in the Proceedings of the Linnean Society on 20 August.
Why did Darwin take so long to publish? No one knows. Darwin started his first notebook on ΓÇÿTransmutation of SpeciesΓÇÖ in July, 1837. By 1842 he had sketched a brief outline of his theory and soon amplified it into the ΓÇÿEssay of 1844ΓÇÖ. He showed this essay only to Hooker; however, he wrote a letter to his wife, asking her to publish the essay in the event of his death. In 1846, he embarked on a study of barnacles that took him eight years to complete.
Perhaps he feared his theory would attract the same controversy and fierce attacks from professional biologists and geologists which greeted the publication (anonymously) in 1844 of Robert Chambers' evolutionary tract, The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Certainly, Darwin's arguments for evolution were more extensive and robust by the time he presented his work to the Linnean Society 14 years later.
The response was less than overwhelming at first. At the end of 1858, the president of the Linnean Society wrote in his annual report that, ΓÇ£The year...has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionise, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear.ΓÇ¥ He could not have been more wrong. In November of the following year, The Origin of Species was published and our view of the world changed forever.
