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Charles Lyell
Summary
As an author, friend and correspondent, Charles Lyell played a crucial role in shaping Darwin's scientific life. Born to a wealthy gentry family in Scotland in 1797, Lyell had a classical and legal education but by the 1820s had become entranced by…
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- … in the Antiquity of Man (1863) and the Principles (1868). As Lyell explained to Darwin : …
Darwin in letters, 1864: Failing health
Summary
On receiving a photograph from Charles Darwin, the American botanist Asa Gray wrote on 11 July 1864: ‘the venerable beard gives the look of your having suffered, and … of having grown older’. Because of poor health, Because of poor health, Darwin…
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- … oxlip ( P. elatior ), and published his results in an 1868 article (‘Illegitimate offspring of …
Virginia Isitt: Darwin’s secretary?
Summary
In an undated and incomplete draft letter to a “Miss I.”, Emma Darwin appears to be arranging for Miss I. to come to Down for a trial period as a secretary. When the letter first came to light, no one had heard of the mysterious “Miss I.” and, as far as we…
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- … Darwins themselves had met Tennyson on the Isle of Wight in 1868. Reading between the lines, it …
Thomas Henry Huxley
Summary
Dubbed “Darwin’s bulldog” for his combative role in controversies over evolution, Huxley was a leading Victorian zoologist, science popularizer, and education reformer. He was born in Ealing, a small village west of London, in 1825. With only two years of…
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- … links between them. In a series of papers beginning in 1868, he proposed that dinosaurs were …
Darwin in letters, 1867: A civilised dispute
Summary
Charles Darwin’s major achievement in 1867 was the completion of his large work, The variation of animals and plants under domestication (Variation). The importance of Darwin’s network of correspondents becomes vividly apparent in his work on expression in…
Photograph album of Dutch admirers
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Darwin received the photograph album for his birthday on 12 February 1877 from his scientific admirers in the Netherlands. He wrote to the Dutch zoologist Pieter Harting, An account of your countrymen’s generous sympathy in having sent me on my…
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- … in the album had given Darwin assistance with his works. In 1868, Darwin wrote to the zoological …
What did Darwin believe?
Summary
What did Darwin really believe about God? the Christian revelation? the implications of his theory of evolution for religious faith? These questions were asked again and again in the years following the publication of Origin of species (1859). They are…
Darwin in letters, 1863: Quarrels at home, honours abroad
Summary
At the start of 1863, Charles Darwin was actively working on the manuscript of The variation of animals and plants under domestication, anticipating with excitement the construction of a hothouse to accommodate his increasingly varied botanical experiments…
The origin of language
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Darwin started thinking about the origin of language in the late 1830s. The subject formed part of his wide-ranging speculations about the transmutation of species. In his private notebooks, he reflected on the communicative powers of animals, their…
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- … V. W. Bikkers. London: John Camdem Hotten. Wake, C. S. 1868. Chapters on man, with the …
Natural selection
Summary
How do new species arise? This was the ancient question that Charles Darwin tackled soon after returning to England from the Beagle voyage in October 1836. Darwin realised a crucial (and cruel) fact: far more individuals of each species were born than…
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- … in Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), which developed his much …
Darwin on race and gender
Summary
Darwin’s views on race and gender are intertwined, and mingled also with those of class. In Descent of man, he tried to explain the origin of human races, and many of the differences between the sexes, with a single theory: sexual selection. Sexual…
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- … Society and History 45: 815–42. Stocking, George. 1868. Race, culture, and evolution: …
Darwin in letters, 1858-1859: Origin
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The years 1858 and 1859 were, without doubt, the most momentous of Darwin’s life. From a quiet rural existence filled with steady work on his ‘big book’ on species, he was jolted into action by the arrival of an unexpected letter from Alfred Russel Wallace…
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- … in his two-volume work on Variation published in 1868 but occupies only a few pages in Origin …
People featured in the German and Austrian photograph album
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Biographical details of people from the Habsburg Empire that appeared in the album of German and Austrian scientists sent to Darwin on 12 February 1877. We are grateful to Johannes Mattes for providing these details and for permission to make his…
Natural Selection: the trouble with terminology Part I
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Darwin encountered problems with the term ‘natural selection’ even before Origin appeared. Everyone from the Harvard botanist Asa Gray to his own publisher came up with objections. Broadly these divided into concerns either that its meaning simply wasn’t…
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- … I suppose “natural selection” was bad term but to change it now, I think, would make confusion …
Interview with Randal Keynes
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Randal Keynes is a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, and the author of Annie’s Box (Fourth Estate, 2001), which discusses Darwin’s home life, his relationship with his wife and children, and the ways in which these influenced his feelings about…
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- … correspondence we've just been working through in 1867 and 1868 shows an enourmous amount of …
The writing of "Origin"
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From a quiet rural existence at Down in Kent, filled with steady work on his ‘big book’ on the transmutation of species, Darwin was jolted into action in 1858 by the arrival of an unexpected letter (no longer extant) from Alfred Russel Wallace outlining a…
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- … in his two-volume work on Variation published in 1868 but occupies only a few pages in Origin. His …
Darwin and Design
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At the beginning of the nineteenth century in Britain, religion and the sciences were generally thought to be in harmony. The study of God’s word in the Bible, and of his works in nature, were considered to be part of the same truth. One version of this…
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- … critics alike, he sketched Darwin as a bishop in a letter of 1868, giving audience to a humble …
Rewriting Origin - the later editions
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For such an iconic work, the text of Origin was far from static. It was a living thing that Darwin continued to shape for the rest of his life, refining his ‘one long argument’ through a further five English editions. Many of his changes were made in…
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- … Darwin worked on the fifth edition from Boxing Day 1868 until February 1869. Among the changes were …
Darwin in letters, 1876: In the midst of life
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1876 was the year in which the Darwins became grandparents for the first time. And tragically lost their daughter-in-law, Amy, who died just days after her son's birth. All the letters from 1876 are now published in volume 24 of The Correspondence…
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- … expressed in the pangenesis hypothesis, first published in 1868 ( Variation 2: 357–404). Others …
Darwin in letters, 1851-1855: Death of a daughter
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The letters from these years reveal the main preoccupations of Darwin’s life with a new intensity. The period opens with a family tragedy in the death of Darwin’s oldest and favourite daughter, Anne, and it shows how, weary and mourning his dead child,…
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- … The letters from these years reveal the main preoccupations of Darwin’s life with a new intensity. …
