Stephen E. Jones wrote:
>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=000113078204876&rtmo=fqrDfrMs&atmo=FFFFFFFX
>&pg=/et/00/4/13/ecfdar13.html
>Electronic Telegraph 13.04.00 ... Alfred Russel Wallace page - Western
>Kentucky University http://www.wku.edu/%7Esmithch/index1.htm ... Did a
forgotten
>naturalist beat Darwin to natural selection?
>...
"When he was on his way back to England in 1852 after four years
>of work collecting in the Amazon, there was a fire on the ship and he lost
>everything. ... he just turned around and said, 'Right, I think I'll go to
>the Malay Archipelago for eight years.'"
I don't think "lost everything" is quite truthful, given that Wallace
had insurance.
>[IMHO Darwin did act less than honourably in not
>immediately forwarding Wallace's MS to Lyell for publication as requested, but
>instead prevailed on his friends Lyell and Hooker to have his abstract read
>jointly with Wallace's paper. However, the claim that Darwin plagiarised
Wallace seems
>unsustainable, since the abstract of Darwin's theory is attached to a letter
>he wrote to Asa Gray in September 1857.
Lyell was not a publisher, nor was Darwin. Wallace must have had reasons
for writing to Darwin other than merely seeking immediate publication. This
matter was all put in the open by all participants at the time, and discussed
by Darwin's greatest contemporary critics, so I doubt that anything new of
interest has come out of Kentucky in 2000.
--Cliff Lundberg ~ San Francisco ~ cliff@cab.com
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