Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Published – 3

Today’s installment concludes Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Published,
our selection by Charles Robert Darwin.

If you have journeyed through all of the installments of this series, just one more to go and you will have completed a selection from the great works of three thousand words. Congratulations!

Previously in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Published.

Time: 1859
Place: England

I gained much by my delay in publishing from about 1839, when the theory was clearly conceived, to 1859; and I lost nothing by it, for I cared very little whether men attributed more originality to me or to Wallace; and his essay no doubt aided in the reception of the theory. I was forestalled in only one important point, which my vanity has always made me regret, namely, the explanation, by means of the Glacial period, of the presence of the same species of plants and of some few animals on distant mountain summits and in the arctic regions. This view pleased me so much that I wrote it out in extenso and I believe that it was read by Hooker some years before Edward Forbes published his celebrated memoir on the subject. In the very few points in which we differed I still think that I was in the right. I have never, of course, alluded in print to my having independently worked out this view.

Hardly any point gave me so much satisfaction, when I was at work on the Origin, as the explanation of the wide difference in many classes between the embryo and the adult animal and of the close resemblance of the embryos within the same class. No notice of this point was taken, as far as I remember, in the early reviews of the Origin and I recollect expressing my surprise on this head in a letter to Asa Gray. Within late years several reviewers have given the whole credit to Fritz Mueller and Haeckel, who undoubtedly have worked it out much more fully and in some respects more correctly than I did. I had materials for a whole chapter on the subject and I ought to have made the discussion longer; for it is clear that I failed to impress my readers; and he who succeeds in doing so deserves, in my opinion, all the credit.

This leads me to remark that I have almost without exception been treated honestly by my reviewers, passing over those without scientific knowledge as not worthy of notice. My views have often been grossly misrepresented, bitterly opposed and ridiculed but this has been generally done, as I believe, in good faith. On the whole I do not doubt that my works have been repeatedly and greatly overpraised. I rejoice that I have avoided controversies and this I owe to Lyell, who many years ago, in reference to my geological works, strongly advised me never to get entangled in a controversy, as it rarely did any good and caused a miserable loss of time and temper.

Whenever I have found out that I have blundered or that my work has been imperfect and when I have been contemptuously criticised and even when I have been overpraised, so that I have felt mortified, it has been my greatest comfort to say hundreds of times to myself that “I have worked as hard and as well as I could and no man can do more than this.” I remember when in Good Success Bay, in Terra del Fuego, thinking (and I believe that I wrote home to that effect) that I could not employ my life better than in adding a little to natural science. This I have done to the best of my abilities and critics may say what they like but they cannot destroy this conviction.

During the last two months of 1859 I was fully occupied in preparing a second edition of the Origin and by an enormous correspondence. On January 1, 1860, I began arranging my notes for my work on the Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, but it was not published until the beginning of 1868, the delay having been caused partly by frequent periods of illness, one of which lasted seven months and partly by being tempted to publish on other subjects which at the time interested me more.

My Descent of Man was published in February, 1871. As soon as I had become, in the year 1837 or 1838, convinced that species were mutable productions, I could not avoid the belief that man must come under the same law. Accordingly I collected notes on the subject for my own satisfaction but not, for a long time, with any intention of publishing. Although in the Origin of Species the derivation of any particular species is never discussed, yet I thought it best, in order that no honorable man should accuse me of concealing my views, to add that by the work “light would be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” It would have been useless and injurious to the success of the book to parade, without giving any evidence, my conviction with respect to his origin.

But when I found that many naturalists fully accepted the doctrine of the evolution of species, it seemed to me advisable to work up such notes as I possessed and to publish a special treatise on the origin of man. I was the more glad to do so as it gave me an opportunity of fully discussing sexual selection — a subject which had always greatly interested me. This subject and that of the variation of our domestic productions, together with the causes and laws of variation, inheritance and the intercrossing of plants, are the sole subjects which I have been able to write about in full, so as to use all the materials which I have collected. The Descent of Man took me three years to write but then, as usual, some of this time was lost by ill-health and some was consumed by preparing new editions and other minor works. A second and largely corrected edition of the Descent appeared in 1874.

This ends our series of passages on Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Published by Charles Robert Darwin. This blog features short and lengthy pieces on all aspects of our shared past. Here are selections from the great historians who may be forgotten (and whose work have fallen into public domain) as well as links to the most up-to-date developments in the field of history and of course, original material from yours truly, Jack Le Moine. – A little bit of everything historical is here.

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