bliged to husband his strength, never able to work more
than an hour and a half at a stretch; yet he accomplished what would
have been vast achievements for half a dozen men of robust health. Two
friends among the eminent scientists of the day knew of his labors--Sir
Joseph Hooker, the botanist, and Sir Charles Lyell, the geologist.
Gradually Hooker had come to be more than half a convert to Darwin's
views. Lyell was still sceptical, yet he urged Darwin to publish his
theory without further delay lest he be forestalled. At last the patient
worker decided to comply with this advice, and in 1856 he set to work to
make another and fuller abstract of the mass of data he had gathered.

And then a strange thing happened. After Darwin had been at work on his
"abstract" about two years, but before he had published a line of it,
there came to him one day a paper in manuscript, sent for his approval
by a naturalist friend named Alfred Russel Wallace, who had been for
some time at work in the East India Archipelago. He read the paper, and,
to his amazement, found that it contained an outline of the same theory
of "natural selection" which he himself had originated and for twenty
years had worked upon. Working independently, on opposite sides of the
globe, Darwin and Wallace had hit upon the same explanation of the cause
of transmutation of species. "Were Wallace's paper an abstract of my
unpublished manuscript of 1844," said Darwin, "it could not better
express my ideas."

Here was a dilemma. To publish this paper with no word from Darwin would
give Wallace priority, and wrest from Darwin the credit of a discovery
which he had made years before his codiscoverer entered the field. Yet,
on the other hand, could Darwin honorably do otherwise than publish his
friend's paper and himself remain silent? It was a complication well
calculated to try a man's soul. Darwin's was equal to the test. Keenly
alive to the delicacy of the position, he placed the whole matter before
his friends Hooker and Lyell, and left the decision as to a course of
action absolutely to them. Needless to say, these great men did the one
thing which insured full justice to all concerned. They counselled a
joint publication, to include on the one hand Wallace's paper, and on
the other an abstract of Darwin's ideas, in the exact form in which it
had been outlined by the author in a letter to Asa Gray in the previous
year--an abstract which was in Gray's hands before