ABSTRACT
Charles Darwin went up to Cambridge as an undergraduate in 1828.1 He set off on his voyage around the world on the Beagle in 1831, returning in 1836. About the time of his return he became an evolutionist, and he hit upon the evolutionary mechanism for which he is most famous, natural selection brought on by the struggle for existence, in the autumn of 1838. In 1842 he wrote a short sketch of his theory, and in 1844 he expanded this into a fairly substantial essay (Darwin and Wallace 1958). At the urging of his friends, in 1856 he started to prepare for publication a massive evolutionary work incorporating his basic ideas (Stauffer 1959, Darwin 1975). This work was interrupted by the arrival of A.R.Wallace’s essay on evolution, one in which he mirrored Darwin’s ideas in an uncanny fashion, in 1858. Thereupon, Darwin dropped all else, wrote an ‘abstract’ of his evolutionary ideas, and this was published as the Origin of Species in 1859.
