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Charles
Darwin (18091882)
On the Origin of Species By Means
of Natural Selection 18581859
By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
University Library
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Charles
Darwin's On the Origin of Species
18581859
Charles
Darwin's (18091882) ideas about speciation
began to take shape after his return from the
six-year voyage of HMS Beagle. Darwin's
study of his zoological specimens from the Galápagos
Islands after his return to England (which he
describes in the letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker,
dated 11 January 1844, on display) led Darwin
to question the immutability of species. His notebooks
from the early 1840s reveal that these ideas had
taken concrete form by this time, but there followed
a very long gestation period in Darwin's thinking.
By the 1850s, he was steadily writing On the
Origin of Species, but felt no compulsion
to finish or publish the work.
Darwin
was not alone in his consideration of the way
in which species evolve, however. His friend Charles
Lyell had, over the years, warned Darwin that
he might be beaten in his announcement of the
theory. As it was, in the Far East another natural
historianAlfred Russel Wallacehad
been working on precisely the same questions Darwin
had posed and had come to very similar conclusions.
Darwin could establish his priority in the discovery
of natural selection, but it was also clear that
Wallace had come to his conclusions quite independently.
At a meeting of the Linnaean Society, hastily
arranged by Hooker, an announcement of the joint
discovery was made. Darwin then had to determine
how to take the publication of his work further.
He decided to make an abstract of his research
on natural selection and worked on this, at great
cost to his health and well-being, for 15 months
between July 1858 and October 1859. On the
Origin of Species was one of the most important
books of the nineteenth century, and was immediately
a great publishing success, much to Darwin's surprise.
By the time of Darwin's death, in 1882, over 22,000
copies had been sold.
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