188 WRITING OF THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. [Ctt. XL 



Wallace's Essay bore the title, " On the Tendency of Varieties 

 to depart indefinitely from the Original Type." 



My father's contribution to the paper consisted of (1) Ex- 

 tracts from the sketch of 1844 ; (2) part of a lette/ addressed 

 to Dr. Asa Gray, dated September 5, 1857. The paper was 

 " communicated " to the Society by Sir Charles Lyell and Sir 

 Joseph Hooker, in whose prefatory letter a clear account of 

 the circumstances of the case is given. 



Eeferring to Mr. Wallace's Essay, they wrote : — 



" So highly did Mr. Darwin appreciate the value of the 

 views therein set forth, that he proposed, in a letter to Sir 

 Charles Lyell, to obtain Mr. Wallace's consent to allow the 

 Essay to be published as soon as possible. Of this step wo 

 highly approved, provided Mr. Darwin did not withhold from 

 the public, as he was strongly inclined to do (in favour of 

 Mr. Wallace), the memoir which he had himself written on 

 the same subject, and which, as before stated, one of us had 

 perused in 1844, and the contents of which we had both of us 

 been privy to for many years. On representing this to Mr. 

 Darwin, he gave us permission to make what use we thought 

 proper of his memoir, &c. ; and in adopting our present course, 

 of presenting it to the Linnean Society, we have explained to 

 him that we are not solely considering the relative claims to 

 priority of himself and his friend, but the interests of scionc* 

 generally." 



Sir Charles Lyell and Sir J. D. Hooker were present at the 

 reading of the paper, and both, I believe, made a few remarks, 

 chiefly with a view of impressing on those present the 

 necessity of giving the most careful consideration to what 

 they had heard. There was, however, no semblance of a 

 discussion. Sir Joseph Hooker writes to me : " The interest 

 excited was intense, but the subject was too novel and too 

 ominous for the old school to enter the lists, before armouring. 

 After the meeting it was talked over with bated breath : 

 Lyell's approval and perhaps in a small way mine, as his 

 lieutenant in the affair, rather overawed the Fellows, who 

 would otherwise have flown out against the doctrine. We 

 had, too, the vantage ground of being familiar with the authors 

 and their theme." 



Mr. Wallace has, at my request, been so good as to allow me 

 to publish the following letter. Professor Newton, to whom 

 the letter is addressed, had submitted to Mr. Wallace his re- 

 collections of what the latter had related to him many years 

 before, and had asked Mr. Wallace for a fuller version of the 



