Reactions to On the Origin of Species is also right". The "Saturday Review" reported that "The controversy excited by the appearance of Darwin's remarkable work on the "Origin of Species" has passed beyond the bounds of the study and lecture-room into the drawing-room and the public street." The older generation of Darwin's tutors were rather negative, and later in May he told his cousin Fox that "the attacks have been falling thick & heavy on my now case-hardened hide.— Sedgwick & Clarke opened regular battery on me lately at Cambridge Phil. Soc. & dear old Henslow defended me in grand style, saying that my investigations were perfectly
Genetics and the Origin of Species whiz by." The book began as a series of lectures at Columbia University in October and November 1936. Dobzhansky decided to attend the summer 1936 meeting of the Genetics Society of America in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. When the geneticist Leslie Dunn learned of this, he invited Dobzhansky to give a series of lectures at Columbia. He sent the invitation in April, and within a month he had suggested that the lectures be a springboard for writing a general treatise on evolutionary genetics. Dobzhansky was enthusiastic, and in May he wrote back, proposing the title "Genetics and the Origin of Species".