Free Charles Darwin* by Kathleen Krull

the essence. Darwin was wrong, they said, about Victorian society: it was more open-minded than Darwin feared. Science meant progress, new ideas and discoveries. It was urgent for Darwin to establish priority for his evolution theory.
    Rather than Darwin handing credit to Wallace on a silver platter, Lyell and Hooker suggested a compromise. They would present both men’s work to the world’s oldest biological society, the Linnean Society of London, named for Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, with evidence that Darwin had been working on his theory for years.
    Darwin agreed, distracted, haunted by nightmares. At the same time, one of his daughters was seriously ill and his baby son Charles was dying of scarlet fever. He and Emma were staying up nights nursing them.
    So, in July 1858, Lyell and Hooker presented Wallace’s essay, extracts from Darwin’s unpublished work of 1844, and an 1857 letter from Darwin to Asa Gray, an important professor of botany at Harvard, in which he had laid out his theory. Darwin was unable to present his own work. On the very day of the meeting he and his family buried baby Charles.
    Oddly enough, the presentation didn’t create much of a stir among the thirty eminent men of science at the Linnean Society. Perhaps they didn’t understand what a giant shift in thinking the papers represented. Perhaps they were blurry from hearing five other papers, on botany and zoological matters. Neither Wallace nor Darwin was there to question or debate. Their absence made the event less exciting. The president of the society, in one of those famous misjudgments in history, later summed up 1858 as lacking “any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize.”
    The papers were officially published in the society’s journal that August. Wallace, like Darwin, was gracious and honorable. When told of Darwin’s earlier research and the meeting at the Linnean Society, he accepted co-credit for the theory. Having his name permanently linked to Darwin’s was not such a bad thing.
    To Darwin’s happy surprise, there was no angry response to his paper. Thus, he immersed himself in finishing the book that would change the world: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.
    He worked furiously, harder than ever before, not at a desk, but writing in his horsehair-stuffed armchair with a board over his legs. Coasters on the chair’s feet allowed him to shift around to reach books, microscope, snuffbox, or his working table as needed. He wrote for the next thirteen months.
    In the middle of the project he did start vomiting again and was forced to take rest breaks at spas, read popular novels of the day, and take up pool playing.
    He wanted his book to be as reader-friendly as possible. So it opened with topics that he knew most people would enjoy—dogs and pigeons. (In fact, one of the readers hired by the publisher advised him to stick to these matters, without all that philosophizing afterward.)
    He quoted a pigeon breeder describing his breeding timetable, saying he could produce the type of feathers he desired in a pigeon in three years, but it took six years to breed pigeons with a particular head and beak. Crossbreeding was a process of selection Darwin labeled “artificial”—the breeder was in control. But, he went on, the process of selection could also occur by “natural” means, with the environment doing the selecting. The breeder was removed from the equation.
    A breeder could improve a species in three to six years, but those changes would be small ones. Imagine the possibilities through the process of natural selection: over millions and billions of years a flying dinosaur could become a chicken. The theory of natural selection ran counter to the biblical estimate of the earth’s age. Four thousand years simply wasn’t long enough for these kinds of monumental changes. Living at Down House had brought home