I would make a similar, but shorter and more accurate sketch for the _Linnean Journal_.
I will do anything. God bless you, my dear kind friend.
I can write no more. I send this by my servant to Kew.
The joint paper[150] of Mr. Wallace and my father was read at the Linnean Society on the evening of July 1st. Mr. Wallace's Essay bore the title, "On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type."
My father's contribution to the paper consisted of (1) Extracts from the sketch of 1844; (2) part of a letter, addressed to Dr. Asa Gray, dated September 5, 1857. The paper was "communicated" to the Society by Sir Charles Lyell and Sir Joseph Hooker, in whose prefatory letter a clear account of the circumstances of the case is given.
Referring to Mr. Wallace's Essay, they wrote:--
"So highly did Mr. Darwin appreciate the value of the views therein set forth, that he proposed, in a letter to Sir Charles Lyell, to obtain Mr. Wallace's consent to allow the Essay to be published as soon as possible. Of this step we highly approved, provided Mr. Darwin did not withhold from the public, as he was strongly inclined to do (in favour of Mr. Wallace), the memoir which he had himself written on the same subject, and which, as before stated, one of us had perused in 1844, and the contents of which we had both of us been privy to for many years. On representing this to Mr. Darwin, he gave us permission to make what use we thought proper of his memoir, &c.; and in adopting our present course, of presenting it to the Linnean Society, we have explained to him that we are not solely considering the relative claims to priority of himself and his friend, but the interests of science generally."
Sir Charles Lyell and Sir J. D. Hooker were present at the reading of the paper, and both, I believe, made a few remarks, chiefly with a view of impressing on those present the necessity of giving the most careful consideration to what they had heard. There was, however, no semblance of a discussion. Sir Joseph Hooker writes to me: "The interest excited was intense, but the subject was too novel and too ominous for the old school to enter the lists, before armouring. After the meeting it was talked over with bated breath: Lyell's approval and perhaps in a small way mine, as his lieutenant in the affair, rather overawed the Fellows, who would otherwise have flown out against the doctrine. We had, too, the vantage ground of being familiar with the authors and their theme."