And Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan:

And so on down to Abraham and then Moses.

By the early 19th century, specimen hunters were collecting samples of all kinds of living creatures from around the world, selling live ones to European zoos, and dead ones to museums. One of these specimen hunters was the Englishman Alfred Wallace. His father had been a librarian. Young Wallace developed an intense interest in "natural history". He was a voracious reader. He met Henry Walter Bates, an avid collector of beetles. In 1845 Wallace told Bates about an exciting new book called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. That book contained the hypothesis that there was a natural law by which a simpler life form gave birth to the type next above it and so on to the highest, with each advance being very small. That there is "a progress of some kind" was supported by the fossil hunters, but still denied by orthodox geologists such as the famous Sir Charles Lyell. Lyell was known to Charles Darwin. Darwin had written a book called the "Journal". Wallace read Darwin's book in 1842-3. Darwin was somewhat long-winded, and so the full title was:

Journal of Researches Into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle Under the Command of Captain Fitzroy, R.N. From 1832-1836 (published in 1839)

Captain Fitzroy had given Darwin a copy of the first volume of Lyell's Principles (on Geology) at the start of the voyage. This was the voyage during which Darwin studied the finches and other life on the Galapagos Islands near South America. But even in the last edition Darwin said nothing of evolution.

In 1847 Wallace and Bates discussed a trip to the tropics to collect specimens, and later that year Wallace wrote to Bates:

I begin to feel rather dissatisfied with a mere local collection....I should like to take some one family to study thoroughly, principally with a view to the theory of the origin of species

Wallace proposed a joint expedition to the river Amazon. They were assured by a Mr. Doubleday of the British Museum that by collecting insects, birds, mammals and snails, they should be able to cover expenses.

After this trip Wallace went to the New Guinea area and here history was made. In February of 1858 he was at Ternate, one of the Moluccas Islands west of New Guinea east of Borneo and South of the Phillippines. There he had a flash of insight, thought it out in a few hours and wrote it down with a sketch of its various applications, copied it on to letter paper and sent it off to Charles Darwin, all within a week. The whole paper was about ten pages long He called it On the Tendency of Varieties To Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type. Here is the gist of his argument, mostly in his own words:

1. Domesticated animals, if left to themselves, tend to return to their wild type. This has led orthodox naturalists to a somewhat prejudiced belief in the stability of species.

2. This assumption is altogether false. There is a general principle in nature causing many varieties to survive the parent species and to give rise to successive variations further and further from the original type.

3. The life of wild animals is a struggle for existence. It requires the full exertion of all their faculties and energies to preserve their own existence and provide for their infant offspring.

4. Large animals cannot be so abundant as small ones. Lions can never be as plentiful as antelopes. The greater or less fecundity of an animal is often considered to be one of the chief causes of its abundance or scarcity: but consideration of the facts will show us it really has little or nothing to do with the matter. Even the least prolific of animals would increase rapidly if unchecked, whereas it is evident that the animal population of the globe must be stationary or perhaps through the influence of man, decreasing. Very few birds produce less than two young ones each year. Four will certainly be below average. If we suppose that each pair produce young only four times in their life (also below average)....a simple calculation will show that in 15 years each pair of birds would have increased to nearly 10 million, whereas we have no reason to believe that the number of birds ....increases at all in 15 or 150 years.

5. It would therefore appear that as far as the continuance of the species and the keeping up of the average number of individuals are concerned, large broods are superfluous.

6. It is evident therefore that each year an immense number of birds must perish--as many in fact as are born. It follows that whatever the average existing number, twice that number must perish annually.

7. Now it is clear that what takes place among the individuals of a species must also occur among the several allied species of a group..viz. that those which are best adapted to obtain a regular supply of food and to defend themselves against enemies and climate must necessarily obtain and preserve a superiority in population.

8. Most or perhaps all variations from the typical form of a species must have some definite effect, however slight, on habits or capabilities--even a change in colour might affect their safety.

9. Now let some alteration of physical conditions occur -- drought, or a locust plague -- say this takes the utmost powers to avoid a complete extermination; the most feebly organized soon become extinct. The superior variety would then alone remain, and on return to favourable circumstances rapidly increase in numbers.

10. The variety would now have replaced the species of which it would be a more perfectly developed and more highly organized form. Such a variety could not return to its original form, for that form is inferior and could never compete with it for existence.

11. This progression of certain varieties by minute steps is a tendency in nature to which there appears no reason to assign any definite limits.

This brilliant paper hit Charles Darwin like an exploding bomb. It had been twenty years since his studies and notes on the Galapagos Islands. All this time he had spent laboriously considering the problem of evolution but it seems to me he had never been able to figure out how it might work. Now this young unknown had dashed off a paper in a few hours of intuitive insight and given him the key to the problem. There was considerable class snobbery in Victorian England and collectors such as Alfred Wallace were looked down upon by the natural scientists. Charles Darwin mingled with the scientists. He had originally studied theology at Cambridge. His grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, was a member of the prestigious and scholarly Linnean Society. Sir Charles Lyell was the leading geologist of his time and Sir Joseph Hooker was the most eminent biologist. Both were intimate friends of Charles Darwin. All three were members of the Linnean Society, Charles Darwin being admitted in 1854.

Charles Darwin had married his cousin, a member of the wealthy Wedgwood family, of pottery fame. He had written and published extensively on various topics in natural history. He spent ten years studying barnacles and many more on pigeons. As to his great book on evolution, in December of 1857 Darwin wrote:

My work on which I have now been at work more or less for 20 years, will not fix or settle anything; but I hope it will aid by giving a large collection of facts.....

Darwin told Lyell about his shock at receiving Wallace's paper. Lyell told Darwin to leave it to him and to Hooker to deal with.

What Lyell and Hooker did was arrange a special meeting of the Linnean Society for July 1, 1858, at which two unpublished pieces by Darwin were read first, touching on evolutionary matters, followed by a reading of Wallace's paper. It is questionable whether or not the excerpts from Darwin were written after he received Wallace's paper.

Personally, in my reading of Darwin's "Origin", I found him to be a rather verbose writer. By page 19 he had already listed the same variety of dog breeds three times. His work is poorly referenced. On one page (17) he says:

Horner's researches have rendered it in some degree probable....

and later on the same page:

I should think from the facts communicated to me by Mr. Blyth....whose opinion, from his large and varied store of knowledge, I should value more than that of almost anyone....

We might well ask: Who are these people, what are their credentials, where and when did they write or say these things?

Darwin does not have a note in his book (in my Hutchinson & Co., London, 1906 edition). Further, the mass of evidence in Darwin's Origin is evidence for the existence of evolution, not its cause, or origin.

Darwin did provide proper references for his other books, so perhaps we can deduce he omitted them from Origin because he was in a hurry to publish it to be sure Wallace was not somehow able to have this thing published first.