Darwin Correspondence Project

When the US football team lost to Belgium in the stadium in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, they could have consoled themselves with the reflection that Darwin didn’t altogether enjoy it either.   Bahia was the place where he first set foot on South American soil when HMS Beagle landed there in February 1832, but a knee injury [...]

We are very pleased to be able to feature four new student projects created using our ‘Darwin and Gender’ university teaching resources.  The resources were developed in collaboration with Prof. Sarah Richardson at Harvard who has used them for the past three years in her ‘Gender, Sex, and Evolution’ course, and bring together Darwin’s fascinating [...]

This week, a bombshell rocked the world of winter sports – hockey is, apparently, not from Canada. What drew our attention to this revelation is a letter from Charles Darwin used as evidence for the game’s roots in England. With several Canadians working on the Darwin Correspondence project, we were intrigued by the notion that [...]

This week Darwin and earthworms featured in the news announcement that a citizen science project has been launched to map the distribution of earthworms across Britain (BBC Today programme, 26 May 2014). The general understanding of the role earthworms play in improving soils and providing nutrients for plants to flourish can be traced back to [...]

Who is this correspondent?   She wrote to Charles Darwin on 16 July 1875   Charlotte was literate and articulate; her use of English was idiomatic. She may not have been young in 1875: she wrote that ‘of course, like all women, I have had no scientific training, and know nothing except from random reading; [...]