LOVING KNOWLEDGE

Taranaki Daily News, 3 August 1935, Page 7 (Supplement)

LOVING KNOWLEDGE

CHANCE OF FAME THROWN AWAY. FRANCIS BURKITT’S SACRIFICE. It happened nearly half a century ago, but very few people ever heard about it; and now that the hero has passed away we may tell the story, says the Children’s Newspaper. There was a brilliant young m®. at Cambridge who was studying a Syriac manuscript and was going to publish his notes. His trends believed that they would make his name, and it would be a strange young man,who cared nothing for becoming famous. - Then he read in the Athenaeum that someone else was working on the same manuscript. His friends urged hun to publish his version quickly and get into the field before the other man. BUt instead he sent his. notes to the rival scholar. That, he said, was the most useful thing to do. Throughou his life he was always as generous with help to other workers. ' But fame came to him all the same. On announcing his, death at the age of 70 the Times said • that in Francis Crawford Burkitt, Cambridge loses one of the most distinguished Divinity -rofessors she has ever had, a pioneer or a master in many ,of the fields that theological studies as they are understood to-day include in their scope,.and one who in particular spheres had a world-wide reputation.” It will be seen, by the story of his early sacrifice, that he brought to his life-long studies of the Scriptures something even greater than his vast-arch-aeological knowledge, a living belief in the message of the New Testament. This remarkable story has a parallel ir the noble self-denial with which Alfred Russel Wallace stood aside and yielded all the glory of his discoveries concerning evolution to Charles Darwin, who had solved the problem too. Wallace, had only met Darwin casually, in the Insect Room of the British Museum, but they had corresponded on scientific subjects. Wallace went off to the Malay Peninsula to study orangoutangs and collect rare forms of life, and when he was resting from fever in 1858 there suddenly flashed upon him the idea of the survival of the fittest. So impressed was he with this theory that he wrote it out in full and sent it across the world to Mr. Darwin in the confident expectation that it would .be as new and startling a revelation to him. When Darwin received it he wrote to Sir Charles Lyell saying that he had never seen a more striking coincidence, and that if Wallace had had his own manuscript sketch, written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract of it, even Wallace’s. terms standing as chapter heads of his own projected book. All his originality, he added, would be smashed! Yet Darwin went on generously to say that Wallace’s paper should be printed at once, so that it would have the place of honour. Sir Charles Lyell, however, demurred, asking Darwin’s permission for an extract from his work to be read. to the Linnean Society at the same time. as Wallace’s paper, and both documents, which revolutionised scientific thought,, were published together. Darwin developed the theory in his famous book on the Origin of Species, and the world was filled with his fame. Wallace was content that all the glory of the joint discovery should be showered on Darwin alone, and never in . his long life did he stress his equal claim.