 Anne Elizabeth (Annie) Darwin Cambridge University Library
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, Darwin persevered with his scientific work, single-mindedly committed to the completion of his barnacle research. His four-volume study was finally published after eight years of work. Darwin's professional circle was enlarged both by new friendships with noted scientists such as the physiologist Thomas Henry Huxley, and the American botanist Asa Gray, but also by contact with a network of animal breeders, nurserymen, and pigeon-fanciers.
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 Cambridge University Library
Darwin's study of barnacles, begun in 1844, took him eight years to complete. The correspondence reveals how his interest in a species found during the Beagle voyage developed into an investigation of the comparative anatomy of other cirripedes and finally a comprehensive taxonomical study of the entire group. Despite struggling with a recurrent illness, he continued to write on geologicy, and published notes on the use of microscopes. Three more children, Elizabeth, Francis, and Leonard, were born during this period, but the death of Darwin's father in 1848 left the family well-provided for.
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 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DAR-00048/187 Part of a letter from W. H. Miller to Darwin exploring the geometrical architecture of honey-combs Cambridge University Library
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 remarkably similar mechanism for species change. This letter led to the first announcement of Darwin’s and Wallace’s respective theories of organic change at the Linnean Society of London in July 1858 and prompted the composition and publication, in November 1859, of Darwin’s major treatise On the origin of species by means of natural selection.
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