I had any confidence what my work would turn out. Sometimes I think it will be good, at other times I really feel as much ashamed of myself as the author of the Vestiges ought to be of himself." According to the historian James A. Secord, Vestiges outsold The Origin of Species up until the early 20th century. Influence on A.R. Wallace It was reading Vestiges in 1845 that first inclined Alfred Russel Wallace to believe that the transmutation of species occurred. It was this belief that would lead him to plan his early field work with the idea of collecting data on the geographic distribution of closely allied species in hopes of finding evidence to support the idea. Wallace made the following comments on the concept of transmutation of species as described in Vestiges in a letter to Henry Bates a few months after first reading it: I have a rather more favourable opinion of the 'Vestiges' than you appear to have. I do not consider it a hasty generalization, but rather as an ingenious hypothesis strongly supported by some striking facts and analogies, but which remains to be proved by more facts and the additional light which more research may throw upon the problem. It furnishes a subject for every observer of nature to attend to; every fact he observes will make either for or against it, and it thus serves both as an incitement to the collection of facts, and an object to which they can be applied when collected. Authorship Because the book was published anonymously, speculation on the authorship naturally began as soon as it was released. Many people were suspected, including Charles Darwin ("I ought to be much flattered & unflattered"), the geologist Charles Lyell, and the phrenologist George Combe, as well as many of the people whose work the book often cited. Early on, Sir Richard Vyvyan, the Tory leader of the parliamentary opposition to the Reform Bill, was a popular suspect. Vyvyan held interests in natural philosophy, phrenology, and Lamarckian evolution. Only three years earlier he had privately printed his own evolutionary cosmology, a copy of which he sent to the English anatomist Richard Owen. The latter likely explains the discrepancy between Owen's critical letter to William Whewell on the Vestiges and his flattering letter to the author, whom he probably thought to be Vyvyan. It was even suggested at one point