Reactions to On the Origin of Species one hundred million years." Copies of the second edition were advertised as ready on 24 December, in advance of official publication on 7 January 1860. The "Saturday Review" of 24 December 1859 strongly criticised the methodology of Darwin's calculations. On 3 January 1860, Darwin wrote to Hooker about it: "Some of the remarks about the lapse of years are very good, & the Reviewer gives me some good & well deserved raps,—confound it I am sorry to confess the truth. But it does not at all concern main argument." A day later, he said to Lyell "You saw I suppose
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".