Biology & medicine · 1858
On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection
Linnean Society · Read 1 July 1858
Darwin’s and Wallace’s papers on natural selection, read together at the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858.
Read the text The whole poster as a web page
- Print from
- A1
- License
- Public domain
- Source
- en.wikisource.org
- Retrieved
- 27 September 2026
- Language
- English
- Rights holder
- Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, 1858
Theme
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Print from A1: the smallest A size at which the body text is at least 8 pt.
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Edition
Wikisource transcription, all 18 pages validated, of the paper as printed in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, Zoology, vol. III, pp. 45-62 (issue 9, August 1858, as its DOI record at Crossref states), from the copy of the Natural History Museum Library, London, scanned by the Internet Archive (journalofproceed00linn). Checked word by word against the OCR of that scan and against its page images. The heading of the paper (title, authors, communicators) is set in the header of the poster, without its “By” and its final full stop; running heads, page numbers and signature marks are left out; the two footnotes, marked with an asterisk in the print, are numbered and set at the end of the text; words hyphenated at line ends are joined, as in the transcription (“well-being” keeps its hyphen); the spaces before ; : ? and ! of the period typesetting are not kept. The italics of the three part headings follow the print, where the names and “Esq.” are roman.
Rights
Published in 1858, before 1931: public domain in the United States. Charles Darwin died in 1882, Alfred Russel Wallace in 1913, and the authors of the covering letter, Charles Lyell and Joseph Dalton Hooker, in 1875 and 1911, all before 1956: public domain in France.
Wikisource marks the work: “This work was published before January 1, 1931, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.” Its footer reads: “Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.” The scan, File:Onthetendencyofspecies.pdf on Wikimedia Commons, is marked public domain.
