Darwin Day 2018: To celebrate Darwin's 209th birthday, we present two lavishly produced albums of portrait photographs which Darwin received from continental admirers 141 years ago. These unusual gifts from Germany and the Netherlands are made available online for the first time through a collaboration with English Heritage and Cambridge University Digital Library.
Flowers, bloom, a son married . . . and a suspended monkey in Cambridge at Darwin's honorary LLD ceremony. Volume 25 of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin is now available. Read more about Darwin's life in 1877 here.
‘I am getting sick of insectivorous plants’ Darwin confessed in January1875. He had worked on the subject intermittently since 1859, and had been steadily engaged on a book manuscript for nine months. January also saw the conclusion of a bitter dispute with the zoologist St George Jackson Mivart. In April and early May, Darwin was occupied with a heated debate over vivisection, and at the end of the year, he campaigned vigorously on behalf of a young zoologist, whose blackballing by the Linnean Society infuriated him: ‘I have not felt so angry for years.’
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 could possibly survive.
Charles and Emma Darwin’s eldest daughter, Annie, died at the age of ten in 1851. Emma was heavily pregnant with their fifth son, Horace, at the time and could not go with Charles when he took Annie to Malvern to consult the hydrotherapist, Dr Gully. Darwin wrote a memorial of his daughter just one week after her death. Annie's younger sister, Henrietta, recorded her own reactions in a poignant set of notes, which Emma Darwin kept.
Read and search the full texts of more than 9,000 of Charles Darwin’s letters, and find information on 6,000 more. Discover complete transcripts of all known letters Darwin wrote and received up to the year 1873.
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