Common Sense with Paul Jacob

On July 1, 1858, a joint reading at the Linnean Society of London of papers by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace debuted a new explanation of speciation and biological evolution.

Linnean Society records record that eminent scientists Charles Lyell and Joseph Dalton Hooker “communicated” the papers of the two breakthrough theorists:

• An extract from Darwin’s unpublished manuscript (written in 1844, part of his Essay).
• An abstract of Darwin’s 1857 letter to Asa Gray, outlining his theory.
• Wallace’s essay, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type” (written in 1858).

Though attended by about 30 prominent intellectuals and scientists of the day, conspicuously not in attendance were either Wallace (who was in the East Indies) or Darwin (whose son Charles Waring Darwin had died two days earlier).

The event proved to be one of the more significant scientific presentations in the history of western civilization.

Charles Julius Guiteau met his death on June 30, 1882, at the end of a rope (as was commonly said at the time), three days shy of a year after shooting newly elected President James A. Garfield.

Guiteau was a member of the “Stalwart” faction of the Republican Party, devoted to the continuation of the kind of job-seeking corruption that Garfield, the reformer, opposed on principle. Despite being on the opposite team, so to speak, Guiteau was an ardent supporter of Garfield in the election campaign, and expected a diplomatic position in return. Failing to gain such a position in the new administration, Guiteau decided upon a sort of mad revenge as the apt response to Garfield’s “betrayal.”

While it took a year to finalize Guiteau’s execution, it took much less time — if itself an excruciatingly long time — for Garfield to die of the wound and the subsequent doctoring, on September 19th, 1881.

On June 29, 1914, the day after the shooting of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Austrian interrogations confirmed — to the satisfaction of Gavril Princip’s interrogators and their government, anyway — that the Serbian state was behind the assassination. Serbia denied involvement.

Thus continued the series of events that led to “The Great War,” now known as “World War I.”