As celebrated as Darwin's On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection is for its impact on science and society, it almost was not written. Darwin kept his ideas on the trasmutation of species confined to his notebooks and conversations with close friends and colleagues because he was aware of the firestorm of public opinion that would result from the clash of his ideas with prevailing Victorian philosophy of special creation and immutability of species.
It was only after Alfred Russel Wallace wrote Darwin with his own nearly identical views of the origin of species that Darwin’s friends pushed him to publish. Darwin considered the resulting 490-page book only an “abstract” of a larger work to come.
The first printing of the Origin sold out on its publication date, November 24, 1859 .
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