Had he been brooding on his theory for twenty years, only to see his life’s work upstaged by someone else? Yet, always a gentleman, he wanted to do the right thing—give Wallace priority, the important acknowledgment in science that gives someone credit as being the first to make a discovery. Now Lyell and Hooker, his most loyal friends and men who were at the top of their fields, stepped in. They argued that evolution was simply in the air, finding an explanation for how it happened was only a matter of time, and now time was of the essence. Darwin was wrong, they said, about Victorian society: it was more open-minded than Darwin feared. Science meant progress, new ideas and discoveries. It was urgent for Darwin to establish priority for his evolution theory. Rather than Darwin handing credit to Wallace on a silver platter, Lyell and Hooker suggested a compromise. They would present both men’s work to the world’s oldest biological society, the Linnean Society of London, named for Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, with evidence that Darwin had been working on his theory for years.
