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Darwin Correspondence Project

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Desmodium gyrans: day and night. Original drawings by G. H. Darwin for Charles Darwin’s Movement in plants, p. 358, fig. 149.
Desmodium gyrans: day and night. Original drawings by G. H. Darwin for Charles Darwin’s Movement in plants, p. 358, fig. 149.
DAR 209.10: 24–5.
By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Darwin in letters, 1880: Sensitivity and worms

‘My heart & soul care for worms & nothing else in this world,’ Darwin wrote to his old Shrewsbury friend Henry Johnson on 14 November 1880. Darwin became fully devoted to earthworms in the spring of the year, just after finishing the manuscript of Movement in plants, his most ambitious botanical book. Both projects explored the complexities of movement, forms of sensitivity, and the ability of organisms to adapt to varying conditions.

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Charles Robert Darwin (1879) by William Blake Richmond
Charles Robert Darwin (1879) by William Blake Richmond
By permission of the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge

Darwin in letters, 1879: Tracing roots

Darwin spent a considerable part of 1879 in the eighteenth century. His journey back in time started when he decided to publish a biographical account of his grandfather Erasmus Darwin to accompany a translation of an essay on Erasmus’s evolutionary ideas by the German science writer Ernst Krause. Darwin’s preoccupation with his own roots ran alongside a botanical interest in roots, as he and his son Francis carried out their latest experiments on plant movement for the book they intended to publish on the subject. They concentrated on radicles—the embryonic roots of seedlings—and determined that the impetus for movement derived from the sensitivity of the tips. Despite this breakthrough, when Darwin first mentioned the book to his publishers, he warned that it was ‘dry as dust’.

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Bernard Darwin
Bernard Darwin, May 1878. Papers of Nora Barlow, CUL MS Add 8904.4: 1158
By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

Darwin in letters, 1878: Movement and sleep

In 1878, Darwin devoted most of his attention to the movements of plants. He investigated the growth pattern of roots and shoots, studying the function of specific organs in this process. Working closely with his son Francis, Darwin devised a series of experiments to trace these subtle movements over long periods of time, often using household materials. Francis spent an extended period in Würzburg at Julius Sachs’s botanical institute, one of most advanced plant laboratories in Europe.

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Monkey suspended at Darwin’s honorary LLD ceremony
Monkey suspended at Darwin’s honorary LLD ceremony
Reproduced from an image held at Christ's College, Cambridge (Darwin Centenary papers) by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of the College

Darwin in letters, 1877: Flowers and honours

Ever since the publication of Expression, Darwin’s research had centred firmly on botany. The year 1877 was no exception. The spring and early summer were spent completing Forms of flowers, his fifth book on a botanical topic. He then turned to the mysterious role of the waxy coating (or ‘bloom’) on leaves and fruit, and to the movement of plants, focusing especially on the response of leaves to changing conditions. He also worked intermittently on earthworms, for the most part gathering observations made by others.

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Hall of Biodiversity, American Museum of Natural History
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ideonexus/2927381691/in/photostream/
Hall of Biodiversity, American Museum of Natural History
Ryan Somma, Flickr

Biodiversity and its histories

The Darwin Correspondence Project was co-sponsor of Biodiversity and its Histories, which brought together scholars and researchers in ecology, politics, geography, anthropology, cultural history, and history and philosophy of science, to explore how aesthetic, economic, and moral value came to be attached to the diversity of life on earth.  The conference included a session on 'Darwin and evolutionary theory' involving past and present members of the Project. 

We are grateful to the speakers for permission to make their talks available here.

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[Right] Charles Lyell, photograph by Ernest Edwards, 1863, From L. Reeve ed. 1863-6 CUL Ii.4.35

The Lyell–Lubbock dispute

In May 1865 a dispute arose between John Lubbock and Charles Lyell when Lubbock, in his book Prehistoric times, accused Lyell of plagiarism. The dispute caused great dismay among many of their mutual scientific friends, some of whom took immediate action to mediate a solution. Charles Darwin had close ties with both men and both sought his advice, but Darwin’s correspondence during this period reveals his reluctance to become directly involved in the dispute.

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Amy Richenda Darwin (née Ruck)
Amy Richenda Darwin (née Ruck)
CUL 416.c.95.249
Cambridge University Library

Darwin in letters, 1876: In the midst of life

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 of Charles Darwin, and a new chapter to Darwin's 'Life in letters' has been added here. 

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Lifecycle of a letter film

Darwin Correpondence Project staff discuss their work on the project and some of the challenges of finding, transcribing, translating and editing letters.

 

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Frances Power Cobbe
http://wellcomeimages.org/
Frances Power Cobbe, Fom: Life of Frances Power Cobbe by Herself, Published: 1894
L0010481
Wellcome Library, London

Darwin and vivisection

Darwin played an important role in the controversy over vivisection that broke out in late 1874. Public debate was sparked when the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals brought an unsuccessful prosecution against a French physiologist who had performed vivisection on dogs.

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William Winwood Reade
William Winwood Reade
CUL Misc.7.91.18
Cambridge University Library

Darwin in letters, 1875: Pulling strings

‘I am getting sick of insectivorous plants’, Darwin confessed in January 1875. 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.’

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