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Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection  18581859
By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

 

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species
1858–1859

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Cambridge University Library
Cambridge
United Kingdom

Charles Darwin's (1809–1882) 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 historian—Alfred Russel Wallace—had 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.