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Wallace continued for another fifty years as a naturalist and thinker, occasionally a very good one, but increasingly fell from scientific favor by taking up dubious interests such as spiritualism and the possibility of life existing elsewhere in the universe. So the theory became, essentially by default, Darwin's alone.
華萊士在以后大約50年里仍然是一名博物學(xué)家和思想家，而且偶爾還干得不錯，但漸漸對科學(xué)失去了興趣，將自己的研究轉(zhuǎn)向了降魂術(shù)以及宇宙中存在別的生命可能性等方面。因此，達爾文主要是因為人家放棄而獨自擁有了進化論的發(fā)明權(quán)。
Darwin never ceased being tormented by his ideas. He referred to himself as "the Devil's Chaplain" and said that revealing the theory felt "like confessing a murder." Apart from all else, he knew it deeply pained his beloved and pious wife. Even so, he set to work at once expanding his manuscript into a book-length work. Provisionally he called it An Abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties through Natural Selection — a title so tepid and tentative that his publisher, John Murray, decided to issue just five hundred copies. But once presented with the manuscript, and a slightly more arresting title, Murray reconsidered and increased the initial print run to 1,250.
達爾文終其一生都為自己的觀點而感到苦惱。他稱自己是“魔鬼的牧師”，說披露進化論使他覺得就像“招認自己是一名殺人犯”。除此之外，他還深深地傷害了他虔誠的愛妻。盡管這樣，他還是立即著手將他的手稿擴充成一本書。一開始他給這本書取名為《物種起源和自然選擇的多樣性概論》，這個書名過于冗長和含混，出版該書的約翰·莫瑞決定只印500冊。但是在拿到手稿以后，再加上使書名稍具吸引力，莫瑞決定將初版的印數(shù)增加到l250冊。
On the Origin of Species was an immediate commercial success, but rather less of a critical one. Darwin's theory presented two intractable difficulties. It needed far more time than Lord Kelvin was willing to concede, and it was scarcely supported by fossil evidence. Where, asked Darwin's more thoughtful critics, were the transitional forms that his theory so clearly called for?
《物種起源》在商業(yè)上立刻取得成功，但卻沒有激起多大反響。達爾文的理論面臨兩個很棘手的困難：一方面，要過很多年以后，它才最終得到開爾文勛爵的承認；另一方面，化石方面所提供的證據(jù)也少得可憐。有一些善于思考的批評家提出這樣的疑問，達爾文的理論中如此明確地強調(diào)的物種的過渡形態(tài)在哪里呢？
