Reception of The Origin of Species
Newton's correspondence gives an intimate view of how he encountered the momentous idea of evolution by means of natural selection:
Not many days after my return home there reached me the part of the Journal of the Linnean Society which bears on its cover the date 20th August 1858, and contains the papers by Mr Darwin and Mr Wallace, which were communicated to that Society at its special meeting of the first of July preceding... I sat up late that night to read it; and never shall I forget the impression it made upon me. Herein was contained a perfectly simple solution of all the difficulties which had been troubling me for months past... I am free to confess that in my joy I did not then perceive that... dozens of other difficulties lay in the path... but I was convinced a vera causa had been found... and I never doubted for one moment, then nor since, that we had one of the grandest discoveries of the age—a discovery all the more grand because it was so simple.
Only four days after the publication of the famous 1858 paper, and one day after he read it, Newton started to apply Darwin and Wallace's idea to various problems in ornithology.
Read more about this topic: Alfred Newton
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