Origin Of The Origin Of The Species Poem by gershon hepner

Thinking about Malthus, Alfred Wallace,
malaria invalid, came close to beating
Charles Darwin at the post, but lost, his solace
the fact that no one thought he had been cheating
in order to get precedence. Both men
mysteriously came up with the same theory,
and Darwin had to hurry with his pen
to make sure that no scientists would query
the fact that he discovered evolution.
Though Lyall praised them both, Charles Darwin burst
more quickly into print with his solution,
to prove that he, not Wallace, was the first.

In November 2008 the Huntington Museum in San Marino opened a new permanent exhibition of scientific books and manuscripts, the Dibner collection, which used to be long to MIT. This afternoon Linda and I saw a copy of a communication made by Charles Lyall and J. D. Hooker to the Linnaean Society in 1858, “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties, ” publicizing the discovery of evolution by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace. Lyall and Hooker wrote:

These gentlemen, having independently and unknown to one another, conceived the very same ingenious theory to account for the appearance and perpetuation of species forms on our planet, may both fairly claim the merit of being original thinkers in this important lime if inquiry.


1/15/09