THE CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN BIOLOGY 



theory of " natural selection " which he himself had 

 originated and for twenty years had worked upon. 

 Working independently, on opposite sides of the globe, 

 Darwin and Wallace had hit upon the same explanation 

 of the cause of transmutation of species. " Were Wal- 

 lace's paper an abstract of my unpublished manuscript 

 of 1844," said Darwin, " it could not better express my 

 ideas." 



Here was a dilemma. To publish this paper with no 

 word from Darwin would give Wallace priority, and 

 wrest from Darwin the credit of a discovery which he 

 had made years before his co-discoverer entered the 

 field. Yet, on the other hand, could Darwin honorably 

 do otherwise than publish his friend's paper and himself 

 remain silent? It was a complication well calculated to 

 try a man's soul. Darwin's was equal to the test. 

 Keenly alive to the delicacy of the position, he placed 

 the whole matter before his friends Hooker and Lyell, 

 and left the decision as to a course of action absolutely 

 to them. Needless to say, these great men did the one 

 thing which insured full justice to all concerned. They 

 counselled a joint publication, to include on the one 

 hand Wallace's paper, and on the other an abstract of 

 Darwin's ideas, in the exact form in which it had been 

 outlined by the author in a letter to Asa Gray in the 

 previous year an abstract which was in Gray's hands 

 before Wallace's paper was in existence. This joint 

 production, together with a full statement of the facts 

 of the case, was presented to the Linnaean Society of 

 London by Hooker and Lyell on the evening of July 1, 

 1858, this being, by an odd coincidence, the twenty-first 

 anniversary of the day on which Darwin had opened 

 his journal to collect facts bearing on the "species ques- 



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