Alfred Russel Wallace

Alfred Wallace (1823–1913). Full name: Alfred Russel Wallace. British naturalist. Developed the theory of natural selection independently of Charles Darwin. In 1858, Wallace sent Darwin an essay from Borneo, entitled On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type, that precipitated Darwin into panic. It gave a full account of the theory of natural selection. At the time, Darwin had been working on the theory for some twenty years, but published nothing. Darwin told his friends Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, two prominent British scientists, about Wallace's paper. Lyell had known Wallace was working on an evolutionary theory and had been warning Darwin to publish. When Darwin received Wallace's manuscript, he sent it on to Lyell. In the covering letter, he rued his procrastination:

"My Dear Lyell,...Your words have come true with a vengeance — that I should be forestalled. You said this, when I explained to you here [i.e., at Darwin's home, Down House, in Kent] very briefly my views of 'Natural Selection' depending on the struggle for existence. 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! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters. ... So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed..."

Hooker and Lyell came to the rescue, arranging for Darwin to publish, alongside Wallace's formal paper, a hurried extract from a manuscript and a personal letter to his friend Asa Gray in which he had sketched his own ideas on natural selection. Many have questioned this course of action (the now famous "Delicate Arrangement"), since it was done without Wallace's knowledge or consent. Darwin then rushed the Origin of Species through to publication the following year. Even Darwin expressed trepidation at the proceedings. As he later wrote in his autobiography:

"The circumstances under which I consented at the request of Lyell and Hooker to allow of an abstract from my MS., together with a letter to Asa Gray, dated September 5, 1857, to be published at the same time with Wallace's Essay, are given in the 'Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society,' 1858, p. 45. I was at first very unwilling to consent, as I thought Mr. Wallace might consider my doing so unjustifiable, for I did not then know how generous and noble was his disposition."

Questions of priority could have been raised. But Alfred Russel Wallace was a modest man, and a considerably younger one than Darwin. He later wrote Darwin and eschewed all credit for the theory. As he put it in his letter, "I shall always maintain it to be actually yours and yours only."

Certainly, Darwin had been working on an evolutionary theory longer than had Wallace. Still, the question remains whether Darwin would ever have steeled himself to publish if Wallace's manuscript had never arrived in the mail.