A PICTORIAL BIOGRAPHY OF CHARLES DARWIN
3: THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
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From September 1854 I devoted my whole time to arranging my huge pile of notes, to observing, and to experimenting in relation to the transmutation of species. |
Thomas
Malthus
(1766-1834 ) 
The astute
1798 observation by Malthus that
human populations would double every 25 years unless they were limited
by food, war, etc. provided both Darwin and Wallace with the vital clue
that led to their independent discovery of natural selection. |
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..early
in the summer
of 1858 Mr.
Wallace, who was then in the Malay archipelago, sent me an essay "On
the Tendency of Varieties to
depart indefinitely from the Original
Type;" and this essay
contained exactly the same theory as mine. Mr.
Wallace expressed the wish that if I thought well of his essay, I
should sent it to Lyell for perusal. |
Alfred
Wallace (1823-1913) 
Self-taught
working class
naturalist extraordinaire, explorer, socialist, philosopher, entrepreneur and largely overshadowed co-discoverer of the 'natural selection' evolutionary process.
Self-taught
working class naturalist extraordinaire, explorer, socialist, philosopher, entrepreneur and largely overshadowed co-discoverer of the 'natural selection' evolutionary process.
The
extract from my MS. and the letter to Asa Gray had neither been
intended for publication, and were badly written. Mr. Wallace's essay,
on the other hand, was admirably expressed and quite clear.
Nevertheless, our joint productions excited very little attention, and
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 was false,
and what was true was old.
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friend, confident and Harvard botonist, to whom Darwin sent an abstract of his new theory in September 1857. |
Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin - codiscoverers of
natural selection. I constructed this montage from separate
photos to bring the two great heroes of evolution togeather
for a commemorative photograph.
Two
versions of the same photo,
taken in 1859, the year Darwin published The
Origin of Species
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I
by no means
expect
to convince
experienced
naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all
viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly
opposite to mine. |
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First
editions
of The Origin of Species, including Darwin's hand
written title page
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I
may, of course, be
egregiously wrong; but I cannot persuade
myself that a theory
which explains several
large classes of facts can be wholly
wrong. |
William Darwin's 1863
portrait of his father.
Emma 
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It is no doubt the chief work of my life. It was from the first highly successful. The first small edition of 1250 copies was sold on the day of publication, and a second edition of 3000 copies soon afterwards. Sixteen thousand copies have now (1876) been sold in England; and considering how stiff a book it is, this is a large sale. It has been translated into almost every European tongue, even into such languages as Spanish, Bohemian, Polish, and Russian. |
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To read The Origin of Speces online, click here.
Darwin grew his famous beard in 1866.
This
excellent albumen print portrait by Ernest
Edwards
was taken around 1867.
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The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. |
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It
has sometimes been said
that the
success of the 'Origin' proved "that the subject was in the air," or
"that men's minds were prepared for it." I do not think that this is
strictly true, for I occasionally sounded not a few naturalists, and
never happened to come across a single one who seemed to
doubt
about the permanence of
species. Even Lyell and Hooker, though they would
listen with interest to me, never seemed to agree. I tried once or
twice to explain to able men what I
meant by Natural Selection, but
signally failed. |
