What took Darwin so long to publish? Why did he suffer bizarre nerve and stomach illnesses and resort to self-torturing remedies such as strapping ice packs on his spine and hanging chains around his neck for the rest of his life? Did the wrong man get the credit? Instead, thanks to a campaign by his friends, he was lionized and lies buried in Westminster Abbey. But in 1859 Darwin beat him to the post: "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" seized the day. He might never have done so, except that Alfred Russel Wallace came to similar conclusions while collecting specimens on the Malay Archipelago and threatened to publish first. & whole fabric totters & falls." Announcing such a belief, he confided to a friend, would be "like confessing a murder." As he wrote in his diary, "Once grant that species. The problem? His discoveries could destroy both the British orthodoxy and his own comfortable position within society. Shattered, he withdrew for life to Down House in Kent, fathering 10 children and suffering from anxiety. He sailed on the Beagle on the 27th of December, 1831, returning five years later with the germ of his "transmutation" theory.
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