A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [194]
Darwin kept his theory to himself because he well knew the storm it would cause. In 1844, the year he locked his notes away, a book called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation roused much of the thinking world to fury by suggesting that humans might have evolved from lesser primates without the assistance of a divine creator. Anticipating the outcry, the author had taken careful steps to conceal his identity, which he kept a secret from even his closest friends for the next forty years. Some wondered if Darwin himself might be the author. Others suspected Prince Albert. In fact, the author was a successful and generally unassuming Scottish publisher named Robert Chambers whose reluctance to reveal himself had a practical dimension as well as a personal one: his firm was a leading publisher of Bibles. Vestiges was warmly blasted from pulpits throughout Britain and far beyond, but also attracted a good deal of more scholarly ire. The Edinburgh Review devoted nearly an entire issue—eighty-five pages—to pulling it to pieces. Even T. H. Huxley, a believer in evolution, attacked the book with some venom, unaware that the author was a friend.*42
Darwin's manuscript might have remained locked away till his death but for an alarming blow that arrived from the Far East in the early summer of 1858 in the form of a packet containing a friendly letter from a young naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace and the draft of a paper, On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type, outlining a theory of natural selection that was uncannily similar to Darwin's secret jottings. Even some of the phrasing echoed Darwin's own. “I never saw a more striking coincidence,” Darwin reflected in dismay. “If Wallace had my manuscript sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract.”
Wallace didn't drop into Darwin's life quite as unexpectedly as is sometimes suggested. The two were already corresponding, and Wallace had more than once generously sent Darwin specimens that he thought might be of interest. In the process of these exchanges Darwin had discreetly warned Wallace that he regarded the subject of species creation as his own territory. “This summer will make the 20th year (!) since I opened my first note-book, on the question of how & in what way do species & varieties differ from each other,” he had written to Wallace some time earlier. “I am now preparing my work for publication,” he added, even though he wasn't really.
In any case, Wallace failed to grasp what Darwin was trying to tell him, and of course he could have no idea that his own theory was so nearly identical to one that Darwin had been evolving, as it were, for two decades.
Darwin was placed in an agonizing quandary. If he rushed into print to preserve his priority, he would be taking advantage of an innocent tip-off from a distant admirer. But if he stepped aside, as gentlemanly conduct arguably required, he would lose credit for a theory that he had independently propounded. Wallace's theory was, by Wallace's own admission, the result of a flash of insight; Darwin's was the product of years of careful, plodding, methodical thought. It was all crushingly unfair.
To compound his misery, Darwin's youngest son, also named Charles, had contracted scarlet fever and was critically ill. At the height of the crisis, on June 28, the child died. Despite the distraction of his son's illness, Darwin found time to dash off letters to his friends Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, offering to step aside but noting that to do so would mean that all his work, “whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.” Lyell and Hooker came up with the compromise