'On 1 July 1858, Darwin's and Wallace's theory was unveiled to the world. Darwin himself was not present. On the day of the meeting, he and his wife were burying their son. The Darwin-Wallace presentation was one of seven that evening - one of the other was on the flora of Angola - and if the thirty or so people in the audience had any idea that they were witnessing the scientific highlight of the century, they showed no sign of it. No discussion followed. Nor did the event attract much notice elsewhere. Darwin cheerfully noted later that only one person, a Professor Haughton of Dublin, mentioned the two papers in print in his conclusion was that 'all that was new in them was false, and what was true was old.'
'Much less amenable to Darwin´s claim of priority over the theory of evolution was a Scottish gardener named Patrick Matthew who had, rather remarkably, also come up with the principles of natural selection more than twenty years earlier - in fact, in the very year that Darwin had set sail in the Beagle. Unfortunately, Matthew had published these views in the Appendix of a book called Naval Timber and Arboriculture, which had been missed not just by Darwin, but by the entire world'.
In one of his essays, Stephen Jay Gould notes how a hero of his named Henry Edward Crampton spent fifty years, from 1906 to his death in 1956, quietly studying a genus of land snails called partula in Polynesia. Over and over, year after year, Crampton measured to the tiniest degree - to eight decimal places - the whorls and arcs and gentle curves of numberless Partula, compiling the results into fastidiously detailed tables. A single line of text in a Crampton table could represent weeks of measurement and calculation.