The similarity in title, as well as the similarity in treatment of the Wallace theme, startled Darwin. He had been working on the idea for twenty years, and had an immense mass of data bearing on the subject, which he some day intended to issue in book form.
His paper for the Linnæus Society simply summed up his convictions. And now here was a man with whom he had never discussed this particular subject, writing an almost identical paper and sending it to him--of all men!
Well did he pinch his leg, and call in his wife, asking her if he were alive or dead. Straightway he went to see Sir Charles Lyell and Sir Joseph Hooker, both more eminent than he in the scientific world, and laid the matter before them. After a long conference it was decided that both papers should be read the same evening before the Linnæus Society, and this was done on the evening of July First, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-eight.
Darwin then decided to publish his "Origin of Species," which in his preface he modestly calls an "Abstract." The publication was hastened by the fact that Wallace was compiling a similar work. After giving Wallace full credit in his most interesting "Introduction," and reviewing all that others had said in coming to similar conclusions, Darwin fired his shot heard round the world. And no man was more delighted and pleased with the echoing reverberations than Alfred Russel Wallace, as he read the book in far-off Australia.
The honor of discovering the Law of Evolution, and lifting it out of the hazy realms of hypothesis and poetry into the sunlight of science, will ever be shared between Charles Robert Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who were indeed brothers in spirit and lovers to the end of their days.
In an insignificant village of England, now famous alone because he began from there his explorations of the world, Alfred Russel Wallace was born, in the year Eighteen Hundred Twenty-two. He was one of a large family of the middle class, where work is as natural as life, and the indispensable virtues are followed as a means of self-preservation. It is most unfortunate to attain such a degree of success that you think you can waive the decalogue and give Nemesis the slip.
About the year Eighteen Hundred Forty, the railroad renaissance was on in England, and young Wallace, alive, alert, active, did his turn as apprentice to a surveyor.