The solution, as I believe, is that the
modified offspring of all dominant and increasing forms tend to become
adapted to many and highly diversified places in the economy of nature.
Early in 1856 Lyell advised me to write out my views fully, and I began
at once to do so on a scale three or four times as extensive as that
which was afterward followed in my _Origin of Species_; yet it was only
an abstract of the materials which I had collected, and I got through
about half the work on this scale. But my plans were overthrown, for
early in the summer of 1858 Alfred Russel Wallace, who was then in the
Malay Archipelago, sent me an essay _On the Tendency of Varieties to
Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type_, and this essay contained
exactly the same theory as mine. Mr. Wallace expressed the wish that if
I thought well of his essay, I should send it to Lyell for perusal.
The circumstances under which I consented, at the request of Lyell and
Hooker, to allow of an abstract from my manuscript, together with a
letter to Asa Gray, dated September 5, 1857, to be published at the same
time with Wallace's essay, are given in the _Journal of the Proceedings
of the Linnean Society_, 1858.
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