By 1856 Darwin had found so much more evidence for evolution that he reopened his 1844 essay and began reworking it. It soon puffed up into a monstrous opus, running hundreds of thousands of words long. He threw in everything he had learned over the years—on his voyage, from his reading and conversations, from his studies on barnacles and seeds. He was determined to wear down the opposition with a river of facts.
Since the day that Charles had shown Emma his manuscript in 1844, he had barely spoken of his theory. But now he felt more confident revealing it to a few people—particularly to younger minds more open to new possibilities. For one of his initiates, he chose a brilliant, struggling young zoologist he had recently befriended, by the name of Thomas Huxley.
Huxley could not practice Darwin’s brand of gentlemanly science. He had been born above a butcher’s shop. His father, a teacher at a failed school and then a director of a failed bank, had no money for Huxley’s education. Huxley became a doctor’s apprentice at age 13 and three years later followed him down to London, where he was trained as a surgeon, barely getting by on scholarships and paltry loans from in-laws. The only way he could pay off his debts was to join the crew of HMS Rattlesnake, a ship bound for the coasts of New Guinea, as an assistant surgeon. Huxley was developing a taste for zoology, and on the voyage he would be free to gather as many exotic species as he wanted.
After four years, Huxley returned to England in 1850, and like Darwin he had been transformed into a scientist by the journey. Like Darwin, he was preceded home by his reputation, with papers already published by the time he arrived, about bizarre creatures such as the Portuguese man o’ war, an animal that is actually a colony of individuals. Huxley arranged a special post with the Royal Navy, with three years’ leave with pay, so that he could continue his research. Without any degree, he was elected to the Royal Society at age 26.
The navy ordered Huxley three times to return to active duty, and the third time he refused they struck him from the list. He struggled to find other work in London and eventually ended up working parttime at the School of Mines. By writing columns and reviews on the side, he earned barely enough money for his family. Huxley resented the wealthy men who dominated science simply because they could afford to. But he managed nevertheless to build a reputation for himself and he wasn’t afraid to attack the dean of English biologists, Richard Owen.
Owen at the time was toying with the idea of a kind of divine evolution. Over time, he proposed, God made new species, always referring to His archetypes for their basic design. Owen pictured a stately unfolding of life according to a divine plan, moving from the general to the specialized: an “ordained continuous becoming.” To calm Owen’s patrons, who still clung to the comfort of natural theology and the fixity of species, he promised that biology was still “connected with the loftiest of moral speculations.”
In public lectures and in reviews, Huxley mocked Owen’s attempts to make God into a draftsman, and to make the fossil record read like His revisions. Huxley didn’t accept evolution in any form, whether divinely guided or simply materialistic. He saw no progress in the history of Earth or of life. But that changed when Darwin invited Huxley to come out to the country one weekend in 1856.
Darwin explained his version of evolution, one that could account for the patterns of nature without resorting to providence or special intervention. He showed Huxley his pigeons and seeds. Soon Huxley was persuaded, and would prove to be Darwin’s greatest ally.
Darwin’s slow, cautious march toward a public declaration was moving along well, until the mail came to Down House on June 18, 1858. Darwin got a letter from the other side of the world, from a traveling naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace was exploring southeast Asia, collecting animals to pay his way, and looking for evidence of evolution. At 21 he had read Vestiges and was seduced by the idea of nature sweeping upward over time. After reading Darwin’s tales of his voyages, Wallace decided he would travel as well.
His first journey was to the Amazon in 1848. Later he traveled to what is now Indonesia to look for orangutans and, he hoped, learn about man’s ancestry. Along his way he financed his trip by sending back boxes of beetles, bird skins, and other specimens to dealers and patrons in London. Darwin was one of those patrons, receiving the skins of birds for his own research, and the two naturalists began to trade letters.
Darwin encouraged Wallace to think broadly and theoretically about evolution, confiding that he had a theory of his own about how species came to be. Wallace decided to write a letter to Darwin to tell him about his own ideas. When Darwin opened it, his heart sank. Wallace had read Malthus as well, and he had also wondered what effect overpopulation would have on nature. And like Darwin, he concluded that it would change species over time and create new ones.
At the time that Darwin received Wallace’s letter, he was planning to write for a few more years before going public. But here was much of his own theory in the handwriting of another scientist. It was not identical—Wallace did not make much of the competition between members of the same species. He proposed simply that the environment culled unfit individuals. But Darwin would not rob Wallace of his proper credit. His sense of honor ran deep, and he would rather have burned his own book than have anyone think he cheated Wallace.
So Darwin arranged with Lyell that the Linnaean Society would hear papers on both his own work and Wallace’s at the same time. On June 30, 1858, the society listened to extracts from Darwin’s 1844 essay, part of a letter he had written about his idea to Hooker in 1857, and Wallace’s paper. Twenty years of cautious research and fretting was suddenly over. The world could now judge.
But no judgment came. Darwin’s and Wallace’s papers were read during a long, rushed session of the Linnaean Society, and were met with silence. Perhaps the papers were too terse, too polite, for the audience to realize just what Darwin and Wallace were proposing. Darwin decided that he now had to lay out his argument in a paper in a scientific journal.
In the months that followed, he struggled to shrink his gargantuan Natural Selection to a brief summary that he could publish. But as he worked on it, the summary swelled to book length again. He simply had too many arguments and pieces of evidence to counter the attacks he knew would come. He contacted John Murray, the publisher of Journal of Researches, and asked if he would print a second book. Journal of Researches had been a hit, so Murray agreed to publish the new volume, which came to be called On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
Along the way Darwin’s health came under fresh attack. When he received the first finished copy of his book, bound in royal green cloth, in November 1859, he was recovering at a spa in Yorkshire. Soon the complimentary copies arrived, and Darwin sent one to Wallace in Indonesia. Along with the book he sent a note: “God knows what the public will think.”
The argument that appeared in Origin of Species had evolved from its ancestral form in 1844. Now it had become something far broader—an all-encompassing explanation for life on Earth.