From the introduction to the Hebrew edition of Charles Darwin's book The Origin of Species, translated and added introduction by: Shaul Adler, Mossad Bialik Publishing House, Jerusalem 1965, third printing, 1997
Charles Darwin
During my service as a naturalist living on His Majesty's ship 'Beagle', I was very surprised by certain facts, involving the explosion of animals inhabiting South America and the geological relationships of its inhabitants, in the present and in the past, to each other. And these facts, as we will see in the later chapters of this book, seemed to me to shed some light on the origin of the animal species - this is the secret of secrets, as they cleared one of the greatest of our philosophers. And when I returned to my home in 1837, it seemed to me that perhaps it would be possible to bring up something on this issue, if I were to gather facts of all kinds that could be related to this matter and look at them. After five years of work, I allowed myself to edit my thoughts on this matter, and I wrote down short things, and in 1844 I went back and expanded them up to chapter-heads of the conclusions, which seemed to me close to knowing at that time;
Since then I have always followed this matter. I hope that the mention of these personal details will not be considered a wrongdoing to me, since I only brought them to prove that I was not in a hurry to reach a conclusion.
And here now (1859) my work is close to completion, but since I still need many years to complete it and I am far from the line of perfect health, I am hasty to publish this summary of things and especially I was awakened to do so, since Mr. Wallace (Wallace) who is now studying the fauna of the Malay Islands region, has reached the conclusions, that there is almost nothing between them and those, which I arrived at on the origin of the species, and nothing. In 1858 he sent me a letter about this matter, and asked me to forward it to Sir Charlemagne Lyell, who gave it to a company named Linnaeus; This article will be published in the third volume of the company's journal. Sir Charles Lyell and Dr. Hooker, who both knew my research, since Dr. Docker read it in 1844, honored me with their opinion and advice, that it is appropriate to publish a few short chapters of the manuscript together with Mr. Wallace's excellent writing. This extract that I am publishing now is by necessity not complete, I cannot bring here examples of places and sources for some of my words; And I trust the reader to trust its accuracy. There is no doubt that there were mistakes here and there, even though my hope was with me, my caution was always up to me, and I relied only on good sources.
I cannot doubt at all that the view that was accepted by most naturalists and also by
I have witnessed this up close, and it is that each species was created for itself without relation to others - by a fundamental mistake. I wholeheartedly believe that species are not immutable; But those who are members of this thing, called to him by the name of genus, are the offspring of other species, most of which have been included, and this is exactly as the recognized varieties of any species, which are the descendants of this species. Apart from that, I am convinced that the natural clarification was the most important (change and adjustment) tool, but not the only one.
