The letter’s author, Alfred Russel Wallace, was 35 years old, the seventh of nine children of a financially declining English family, largely self-educated, working at the time as a specimen-collector in what is now eastern Indonesia, financing his expeditions by shipping insect and bird specimens back to British natural-history dealers who sold them on to collectors and museums. He had spent eight years in such fieldwork — four years in the Amazon basin (1848-1852, ending in a shipwreck that destroyed nearly all his specimens) and four years at that point in the Malay Archipelago (1854 onwards), during which he had collected approximately 80,000 beetles, identified the biogeographical divide now known as the Wallace Line that separates the Asian and Australasian faunas, and produced the 1855 paper “On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species” — the so-called Sarawak Law paper — which Darwin had read with interest, marked with marginal notes, and corresponded with Wallace about in subsequent letters. The two men had been writing to each other since 1857. Darwin knew Wallace’s work. Darwin had not, however, met Wallace, and would not meet him for several more years.
According to the Alfred Russel Wallace Foundation’s archive of the 1858 Darwin-Wallace paper and the documentary record surrounding its composition, the essay Darwin opened on 18 June 1858 had been written four months earlier, in February 1858, in a village called Dodinga on the Indonesian island of Halmahera, while Wallace was confined to a hut with a recurring attack of malarial fever. The fever cycles — four days of severe symptoms followed by partial recovery — left Wallace bedridden for hours at a stretch with little to do except think. He was already, by his own subsequent account, puzzling over the question of how species changed over time, when he recalled a passage from Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population that he had read approximately a decade earlier — the same passage, as it happened, that had triggered Darwin’s original 1838 insight into natural selection. The two men, separated by twenty years of independent thinking and approximately 13,000 kilometres of geography, had been led to the same conclusion by the same reading of the same author. Wallace asked himself, over the course of several feverish days, why some individuals in a species died and others lived. He concluded that, on the whole, the best-fitted lived. He wrote out the resulting essay in approximately three nights. He returned to Ternate on 1 March, refined the manuscript, and posted it via the mail boat on 9 March, addressed to Charles Darwin in England, with a cover note asking Darwin to forward it to Lyell if Darwin considered it of sufficient scientific value.
The week Darwin spent deciding what to do
Darwin’s first reaction, recorded in a letter to Lyell written the same day he received Wallace’s essay, was that the situation was catastrophic. “Your words have come true with a vengeance,” he wrote, referring to a warning Lyell had given him approximately two years earlier that if he did not publish quickly, somebody else would arrive at the same theory and publish first. “I never saw a more striking coincidence; if Wallace had my MS sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract!” The 1842 sketch Darwin was referring to was a 35-page private outline of the natural selection theory he had written for himself, expanded into a 230-page essay in 1844, and never published. By 1858, Darwin had been working on a vastly expanded version — a planned multi-volume natural-history magnum opus tentatively titled Natural Selection — for two years, at Lyell’s urging, but the manuscript was nowhere near finished. Wallace’s essay, by contrast, was complete, was already in Darwin’s possession, and contained, by Darwin’s own reading, essentially the same theory he had been developing privately for two decades. “All my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed,” Darwin wrote.
The situation was further complicated by Darwin’s family circumstances. His infant son Charles Waring Darwin, then 18 months old, had contracted scarlet fever earlier in June. The child died on 28 June 1858, ten days after Wallace’s letter arrived. Darwin’s eldest daughter Etty was also seriously ill (she would recover). Darwin was, in essential respects, not in a position to make sustained decisions about scientific priority during the second half of June 1858. The resolution of the priority question was therefore arranged, on Darwin’s behalf, by Lyell and the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, who had been Darwin’s closest scientific confidant for approximately fifteen years and who had read the unpublished 1844 essay. As described in the Linnean Society of London’s anniversary commemoration of the 1858 presentation that introduced natural selection to the scientific world, Lyell and Hooker arranged a joint reading of Darwin’s and Wallace’s material at the Linnean Society’s meeting of 1 July 1858 — a Thursday evening session in central London at which neither author was present. Darwin was at home in Kent, burying his son. Wallace was in eastern Indonesia, unaware that any of this was happening, and would not learn of the presentation for several months.
What was actually read
The materials read at the Linnean Society meeting on 1 July 1858 were arranged in a specific order designed to establish Darwin’s chronological priority while also fairly representing Wallace’s independent discovery. As detailed in a Current Biology article on the scientific friendship between Darwin and Wallace and the structure of the joint paper, Lyell and Hooker first read extracts from Darwin’s unpublished 1844 essay — the document that demonstrated Darwin had been thinking about natural selection 14 years before Wallace’s letter arrived. They then read a letter Darwin had written to the American botanist Asa Gray in September 1857, which contained a concise summary of natural selection. Only after these two prior-art demonstrations did they read Wallace’s complete Ternate Essay. The arrangement, while procedurally fair, was unmistakably weighted: Darwin’s material came first, established his earlier dates, and framed Wallace’s contribution as confirming an already-developed theory rather than as an independent discovery on equal footing. The audience reaction, by all accounts, was muted. The papers were read by the society’s secretary J. J. Bennett. There was no discussion. Nobody present appears to have understood the magnitude of what had just been presented. The combined paper was published on 20 August 1858 in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society: Zoology.
Wallace’s response to the arrangement, once he learned of it, was generous to the point of self-effacement. He had not been consulted, but he expressed no objection. He considered himself fortunate to be associated with Darwin’s name on a foundational scientific paper, praised the priority arrangement as fair, and devoted much of the subsequent half-century of his career to defending Darwin’s broader theory of evolution against critics. Darwin, for his part, abandoned the planned multi-volume Natural Selection and spent the next 15 months rapidly writing what he called an “abstract” of the larger work — a 502-page book published on 24 November 1859 under the title On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The first edition sold out on its day of publication. Wallace lived another 55 years, became one of the leading scientific figures of the late Victorian period, was awarded the inaugural Darwin-Wallace Medal in 1908, the Order of Merit in the same year, and died at the age of 90 in November 1913 — a co-discoverer of the most important scientific theory in the history of biology, whose name appears alongside Darwin’s on the original 1858 paper, but whose subsequent place in the popular memory of evolution has remained, for reasons partly accidental and partly structural, substantially smaller than the man whose hand had been forced by his letter from the Indonesian jungle.
