The “common cuttle-fish.” From Mysteries of the Ocean.

About three decades before On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection would forever change biological science, the aspiring young naturalists Pierre-Stanislas Meyranx and Laurencet submitted a paper on mollusks to France’s prestigious Academie des Sciences. For weeks they waited for a patron from within the scientific elite to recognize their work, but no response came. Ultimately they decided to take the more direct route of having the paper examined by a commission, and in 1830 the naturalists Pierre-Andre Latreille and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire were assigned to review it.

Had the mollusk memoir been given to other members of the academy it might have sunk into total obscurity. (And,