darwin evolutionary writings

Evolutionary Writings
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CHARLES DARWIN
Evolutionary
Writings
Edited by
JAMES A. SECORD
1
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1
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction vii
Note on the Texts xxxviii
Select Bibliography xl
A Chronology of Charles Darwin xlvi
EVOLUTIONARY WRITINGS
journal of researches 1
Map of the Beagle voyage, 1831 – 1836

2
Journal of Researches into the Natural History and
Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage of
H.M.S. Beagle Round the World (1845)
3
Reviews and Responses
96
origin of species 105
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859)
107
Reviews and Responses
212
descent of man 231
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)
233
Reviews and Responses
334
autobiographies 349
Life (1838)
351
Recollections of the Development of My Mind and
Character (1876 – 1881)
355
The Making of a Celebrity
426
Explanatory Notes 437
Biographical Index 455
General Index 477
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This anthology stems from my involvement with the Darwin
Correspondence Project, which is editing all the letters to and from
Charles Darwin. The Project receives essential and very generous sup-
port from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, British Ecological
Society, Isaac Newton Trust, John Templeton Foundation, National
Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation.
I wish to thank William Huxley Darwin for permission to publish the
Recollections and 1838 ‘Life’, and the Syndics of Cambridge University
Library, the Geological Society of London, Special Collections and
Archives of Knox College Library, Galesburg, Illinois, Trustees of the
National Library of Scotland, and Trustees of the Natural History
Museum, London, for permission to publish manuscripts in their pos-
session. Permission to publish material from the Correspondence of
Charles Darwin, ed. F. Burkhardt et al. (1985– ) has been granted by
the Syndics of Cambridge University Press. Heather Brink-Roby pro-
vided invaluable assistance throughout, and the biographical index is
largely her work. Many individuals mentioned in the early pages of the
Recollections were identified by Donald F. Harris. Paul White offered
excellent suggestions and references for the Introduction, which was
also much improved after discussion by the Past versus Present project
of the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group, funded by the Leverhulme
Trust. John van Wyhe has been unfailingly generous in sharing infor-
mation, particularly through his remarkable Darwin website. I espe-
cially wish to thank Marwa Elshakry, who with the assistance of Ahmed
Ragab has provided fresh translations from Arabic; Adriana Novoa and
Alex Levine, for access to their forthcoming collection of Argentine
responses; and Shelley Innes, for help with Russian and German trans-
lations. The capable support of Alison Pearn made it possible to finish
this in time. I am also grateful to Janet Browne, Rosy Clarkson, Diana
Donald, Samantha Evans, Nicola Gauld, Melanie Keene, Sam Kuper,

Randal Keynes, David Kohn, David Livingstone, Peter Mandler, Clare
Pettitt, Kees Rookmaaker, Liz Smith, and many other friends. Judith
Luna has been an exemplary editor: patient, accommodating, and
enthusiastic. I am most indebted to Anne Secord, whose encourage-
ment and constructive criticism have been vital at every stage.
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INTRODUCTION
If the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century was dominated
by Marx, Freud and Darwin, it is clear that the reputation of only one
of that heroic triumvirate has survived intact into the twenty-first.
With so-called ‘Darwinian’ views on economic and social competi-
tion in the ascendant, the international pre-eminence of Darwin is
more marked than ever, his books more widely read and discussed
than at any time since they first appeared. Darwin’s views on human
origins, the beginnings of life, and the nature of the fossil record play
key roles in controversies about religion and science, particularly in
relation to the teaching of evolution in schools. His account of the
human mind has proved central in the development of psychology.
His subtle analyses of the interconnectedness of life and environment
are reference points in debates about species extinction and climate
change. He is hailed as a visionary in fields as diverse as linguistics
and global geology. His theory of evolution by natural selection is the
coping stone of the modern life sciences.
Darwin’s fame grew out of the reception of his books, and although
he wrote thousands of letters and hundreds of scientific articles and
occasional pieces, reading Darwin means reading books. Of these,
three were instrumental in establishing his reputation during his
lifetime: the revised edition of the Journal of Researches (1845), an
account of his voyage around the world on HMS Beagle, which
touched implicitly on evolutionary themes; On the Origin of Species

(1859), which outlined his novel theory of evolution by natural selec-
tion; and The Descent of Man (1871), which applied his ideas to the
study of humans. In terms of his personal reputation, the central text
is Recollections of the Development of My Mind and Character, pub-
lished in 1887 as the opening chapter in a memoir edited by one of
his sons.
Darwinism is a global phenomenon. Origin has been translated
into over thirty languages, more than any scientific work other than
Euclid, while the Recollections and Descent of Man are each available
in twenty. The power of Darwin’s writings derives from their ability
to challenge, surprise, and inspire readers in the widest possible
range of circumstances. It is because these books have been read in
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Introduction
viii
so many ways that it is vital to confront the texts in the originals and
not just as pithy quotations or through piecemeal searches on the
internet. Yet with the collected works occupying twenty-nine vol-
umes, this is not an easy task. Existing selections often leave out
Darwin’s most controversial and innovative ideas, and have been
edited with an eye towards current evolutionary biology. Reading
a single work, although an obvious starting point, is only a partial
solution. Even the 500-plus pages of Origin say almost nothing about
humans and give a tactically skewed view of what its author is trying
to do.
So much has been at stake in reading Darwin’s deceptively simple
prose that understanding his books has proved elusive. Darwin is
often presented as believing in natural selection as the sole mechan-
ism for evolution, but this was never the case, not even in the Origin’s
first edition. His views on heredity are still typically seen as a blank

waiting to be filled in by the discoveries of Gregor Mendel, the rise
of laboratory-based genetics, and the discovery of the DNA struc-
ture; yet nothing could be further from the truth. Darwin was
intensely interested in variation, reproduction, and inheritance, as is
clear from the early chapters of Origin. To take another example, his
views on the status of women and the extinction of races are often
minimized or misunderstood. Darwin did not, as was long thought
to be the case, turn to these issues only towards the end of his life;
they were there from the first. And finally, it is only through reading
a range of his works, and reactions to them, that we gain an idea of
his complex and ambiguous attitudes towards religion. He was cer-
tainly not an atheist. Darwin may say in his Recollections that
Christianity is a ‘damnable doctrine’ (p. 392),
1
but his ideals of moral
virtue in Descent are carefully grounded in the golden rule preached
by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount (p. 255).
Darwin’s writings still hold the power to shock. His pages include
scenes of surpassing beauty in nature, described in passages of
glowing prose; but we are to understand these as outcomes of war,
conquest, invasion, and extermination. A raw sense of the violence of
nature is combined with an appreciation for its interconnectedness
and fragility. The energy of life is possible only through the hovering
presence of death. The coral reefs of the Indian Ocean grow on
1
Page numbers in the text refer to this edition.
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ix
miles-high cemeteries of dead ancestors. Parasitic grubs eat the

bodies of their hosts from the inside out. Patrician landowners dwell
in luxury by means of a hidden economy of slave labour. The living
world of animals and plants, for all its apparent order and design, is
the outcome of a multitude of individual acts of casual violence. The
face of nature is bloodied by a force like that of a hundred thousand
wedges. These are not rhetorical set pieces or concluding flourishes;
rather, they appear in the context of a cumulative weight of examples
expressed in plain and simple prose. The occasional awkwardness in
construction and the tendency of the later works to mirror Darwin’s
self-conception as ‘a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of
large collections of facts’ gives a sense of an author concerned about
substance (p. 422). Readers are invited to observe closely, even
obsessively: to share a fascination for the instinctual habits of ants,
the finer points of pigeon fancying, and the sexual antics of barnacles.
Although the books are only intermittently autobiographical, the
reader gains a strong sense of their author, whose self-deprecating
enthusiasm is infectious. In detailing the courtship rituals of the
Australian bower bird, the intelligence of earthworms, or the fertil-
ization mechanisms of orchids, Darwin’s appreciation of nature in all
its aspects is evident.
A remarkable number of Darwin’s books have remained continu-
ously in print, and they occupy a unique status in the canon. Not
only are they almost the only scientific books from the past three
centuries which attract a non-specialist readership decades after pub-
lication, but the number of readers across the world is growing. How
have Darwin’s writings achieved this? On his death in 1882 Darwin
was already heralded as a great man, and his significance was
acknowledged even as his theories were widely challenged at the end
of the nineteenth century. But it is only in the fifty years since the
centenary of the publication of Origin in 1959 that Darwin has

emerged as the epitome of the scientific celebrity. His bearded image
is everywhere from television documentaries to postage stamps, bank-
notes, magazine covers, religious tracts, advertisements, caricatures,
and cereal packages. Creative genius, racist, opponent of slavery,
murderer of God, patient observer, engineer of western imperialism,
apologist for capitalism, gentle prophet of evolution: there is poten-
tial validity, to a larger or lesser degree, in each of these readings.
The multiplicity of images point to Darwin’s books as fault-lines for
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x
controversy, opening new questions and fresh lines of enquiry. Their
power derives from an ability to express simultaneously the expan-
sive confidence of the century in which he lived, and the ambiguity,
uncertainty, and fragility of the place of humans in nature.
An Imperial Voyage
When the writer Elizabeth Gaskell needed a model for a young trav-
eller-naturalist in her last great novel Wives and Daughters (1864 – 6)
there was one figure familiar to all: Darwin, whose narrative of his
travels around the world her readers could be expected to know. His
Journal of Researches closely followed the conventions of the expedi-
tion narratives produced by naturalists writing in the wake of the
explorer James Cook and the Prussian naturalist Alexander von
Humboldt, combining lively adventure with scientific observations,
accounts of encounters with indigenous peoples, and evocations of
exotic scenery. Publication of the Journal secured Darwin’s reputa-
tion as a noted man of science and literary lion in the London salons.
It was thus in the context of the burgeoning programme of European
imperial exploration that Darwin first came to public attention.
Darwin’s status on the Beagle had been highly unusual, for he was

not the ship’s naturalist, but a gentleman companion to the captain,
Robert FitzRoy. Darwin had special privileges, including first choice
of natural history specimens and a place at the captain’s table. Not
surprisingly, the surgeon officially appointed as naturalist left in dis-
gust almost as soon as the Beagle docked in South America. Darwin
claimed to be a novice in natural history at the start of the voyage, but
this is misleading. Born in February 1809, he had come from gentry
stock at the heart of the English scientific enlightenment. His
mother, who died when Charles was only 8, was a daughter of Josiah
Wedgwood, the celebrated founder of the pottery manufacturing
dynasty. His father, Robert Darwin, was a successful physician and
son of the poet Erasmus Darwin, a renowned author of evolutionary
speculations and erotic botanical verse. Young Charles, like his
father and grandfather, studied medicine. Disinclined to practise
after training in Edinburgh (he couldn’t stand the sight of blood), he
proceeded to Cambridge to prepare for a career as an Anglican priest.
Throughout his education, however, his real passion was for nat-
ural history, and he became acquainted with leading men of science.
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xi
Darwin may have dismissed the Edinburgh naturalist Robert
Jameson as ‘that old brown, dry stick’, but attended dozens of his
lectures and spent hours in his fabulous museum.
2
By the summer
after graduating from Cambridge in 1831, Darwin was at 22 probably
the best-educated naturalist of his age in Britain, particularly skilled
in invertebrate zoology and with some knowledge of geological sur-
veying and natural history collecting. Inspired by Humboldt’s mag-

nificent travel writings, he was plotting an expedition to the
mid-Atlantic island of Tenerife.
But larger prospects loomed. The sciences were tied to global
trade, with European governments supporting large-scale expedi-
tions and surveys. The Beagle’s aim was to provide better charts
of the South American coasts, including economically significant
harbours and the treacherous straits around Tierra del Fuego. The
continent was just opening up to English trade after centuries of
domination by Spain and Portugal. FitzRoy, who came from one
of the oldest aristocratic families in England, was a keen supporter of
this enterprise, and had asked the Cambridge scientific men to sug-
gest someone to travel with the Beagle, who could contribute to its
scientific aims, pay for his passage, and provide much-needed gen-
teel company. The trip, as Darwin acknowledged, was the most
important event of his life. He learned to hunt wild rheas (a kind of
South American ostrich) on horseback, witnessed the mass killing
of aboriginal peoples, and saw slaves beaten by their masters. He col-
lected the gigantic bones of extinct sloths and armadillos, walked
through tropical jungles, climbed high peaks in the Andes, and
observed the effects of an earthquake on a great city. He kept
me ticulous notebooks and collected thousands of specimens, each
carefully numbered and tagged in preparation for description by
specialist naturalists back home. As his father noted on Darwin’s
return, the years of concentrated scientific observation had extended
even the ridge of his eyebrows.
3
Of all the extraordinary things Darwin gathered, the most strik-
ing were visual impressions of human diversity. Wherever he went,
Darwin categorized racial types: the tall Tehuelches of Patagonia; the
2

C. Darwin to J. D. Hooker, 29 [May 1854], in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin,
ed. F. Burkhardt et al., v (1989), 195. Hereafter referred to as Correspondence.
3
L. A. Nash, ‘Some Memories of Charles Darwin’, Overland Monthly and Out West
Magazine, 16 (Oct. 1890), 404 – 8, at 405.
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xii
meat-eating Gauchos of the Pampas; Spanish ladies with their great
combs and dark hair; Australian aboriginals; and Malay peoples of
the Indian Ocean. From his first landing on the mid-Atlantic island
of St Jago, he had focused on the aesthetics of race, noting how ‘black
skins and snow-white linen’ were set off by ‘coloured turbans and
large shawls’ (p. 6). The Beagle itself displayed in microcosm a range
of human variation among the crew, and most clearly in three natives
of Tierra del Fuego (one Alakaluf man, and a Yamana man and
young woman) who had been captured during the previous voyage.
After several years in England, the adaptation of the three to their
new circumstances was reflected in their European clothes and abil-
ity to speak some English. In the early weeks of the voyage, o’run-
del’lico (named Jemmy Button by the crew) consoled Darwin on his
seasickness, who considered him sympathetic, intelligent, almost
civilized. It was encountering ‘Fuegians’ in the very different cir-
cumstances of their homeland in the southernmost part of South
America that gave Darwin a shock that would last to the end of his
life. Their culturally rich, although hard life of hunting and fishing
appeared to him as little better than wretched misery; their complex
languages seemed an undifferentiated primitive babble; their cus-
toms and body painting were signs of demonic bestiality.
4

An ardent
believer in the unity of the human race and a passionate opponent of
racial oppression, Darwin was barely able to define these ‘savages’ as
members of his own species.
In terms of self-perception, Darwin’s greatest discovery on the
voyage was his vocation for science. Among the new disciplines
which came into being in the early nineteenth century, the most
exciting was geology, which had been freshly confected from mineral
surveying, biblical chronology, and the study of fossils. Upon his
first landing, Darwin began to write of himself as a geologist, and his
notebooks reveal that he was already thinking of global subsidence
and uplift on a global scale. He was especially indebted to Charles
Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830 – 3), the first volume of which
was a gift from FitzRoy just before the Beagle set sail. Darwin’s
most successful and audacious speculation answered one of the
4
N. Hazelwood, Savage: The Life and Times of Jemmy Button (New York, 2001),
offers an accessible overview; important parts of the main anthropological work are
translated in J. Wilbert (ed.), Folk Literature of the Yamana Indians: Martin Gusinde’s
Collection of Yamana Narratives (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977).
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xiii
government’s chief desiderata for the voyage — a convincing explan-
ation of coral reefs. Darwin suggested, before he ever saw a reef, that
they grew up over thousands of years, millimetre by millimetre, as the
ocean floor submerged. Although this theory overturned Lyell’s belief
that coral reefs grew upwards from the rims of underwater volcanoes,
in another way it illustrated just how deeply Darwin had come to see
the world with Lyellian eyes, for it relied on Lyell’s belief in the cumu-

lative effects of tiny processes over long periods of time. It was also the
outcome of his interest, present since his student days in Edinburgh,
in invertebrate zoology and the microscopic study of living matter.
For Darwin, the voyage offered the opportunity to secure a place
among the leading men of science in London, and his main work
after returning was to produce three volumes on the geology of the
places visited during the voyage, as well as writing several important
scientific papers. With the help of a generous Treasury grant, he also
edited a sumptuous set of folios illustrated with colour plates on the
voyage’s zoological findings. These were reference works targeted at
specialists, which secured his credibility as a man of science. The
unexpected publishing triumph was Darwin’s Journal of Researches.
Based on his informal voyage diary, the book combined engaging
incidents of travel with scientific observation and speculation. This
genre, epitomized by Humboldt’s celebrated Personal Narrative, had
attracted Darwin to scientific voyaging in the first place. The title
under which it commonly appears today, The Voyage of the Beagle, is
a twentieth-century invention and rightly belongs to FitzRoy’s book
about the voyage. Initially Darwin’s Journal had a limited circulation,
as the third volume of an expensive set of publications dominated by
FitzRoy’s Narrative. Early in the voyage the captain had praised the
quality and interest of Darwin’s diary, and he generously offered to
include it in the final reports. Only a wealthy readership could be
expected to consult this kind of work, although the publisher Henry
Colburn also issued it as a stand-alone volume, and it was widely
reviewed. Its long-term future was secured when the adventurous
London publisher John Murray decided to include it in his Colonial
and Home Library series in 1845. Darwin had revised heavily,
streamlining his text and adding expert opinions from the naturalists
who had contributed to the Beagle zoology. The chapter on the

indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego was expanded, and his coral
reef theory was given in more detail.
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xiv
The most significant change, however, was in format and readership,
for Murray advertised his series as ‘cheap literature for all classes’, and
in three inexpensive paper-covered parts at half the original price,
it could now be afforded by professional families, merchants, and
working-class libraries. It became, for example, one of the books that
the fictional tailor in Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850) could rea-
sonably have been expected to have read. With its small type and nar-
row margins, this version of the Journal of Researches made Darwin’s
reputation as a writer and introduced his ideas to a wider public in the
English-speaking world. Crucial to this process was the transformation
of printing, publishing, and bookselling in the mid-nineteenth century,
which made it possible to produce and distribute books far more
cheaply than before. The book was widely acclaimed, and there were
cheap pirated editions in the United States, beginning with a two-
volume version from Harper in New York. From the 1870s it began to
appear in other languages; the only early one, an 1844 German transla-
tion of the original edition, had been instigated by Humboldt. Widely
read in the late nineteenth century, Darwin’s Journal had a second life
as the archetype of a ‘boy’s own’ imperial adventure, all the more attrac-
tive as the romantic setting for a great discovery.
The Mystery of Mysteries
Although Darwin was convinced of the truth of evolution when the
second edition of his Journal appeared in 1845, he only hinted at his
beliefs in public. Yet this revised version, with its expanded discus-
sions of geographical distribution and the succession of animals in

the fossil record, was effectively his first evolutionary book. It asked
the right questions and posed the appropriate puzzles. For the first
time, the Galapagos were recast into a laboratory for the study of
how one species might change into another. ‘Hence, both in space
and time,’ he wrote, ‘we seem to be brought somewhat near to that
great fact — that mystery of mysteries — the first appearance of new
beings on this earth’ (p. 44). Darwin here recalled a famous discus-
sion of the problem of species by the imperial astronomer John
Herschel, with whom he had dined at the Cape of Good Hope on the
final leg of the Beagle’s return home.
We will probably never know if Herschel and Darwin discussed
the mystery of species at this crucial juncture, but there can be no
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xv
doubt that both men recognized that the issue was best canvassed in
private conversation rather than in publication. The marginal status
of theorizing about the evolution of new species — or ‘transmutation’,
as it was generally called — at the time Darwin wrote up his Beagle
results can only be understood in relation to the extraordinary trans-
formation of the sciences in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. This involved the greatest change in the organization and
practice of knowledge since the early Middle Ages, when the cathe-
dral schools and universities had introduced the scientific learning of
Islam and the Greeks (particularly Aristotle) into Christian educa-
tion. At that time an understanding of nature was divided into nat-
ural philosophy, which investigated the causes of things, and natural
history, which offered description and inventory. The ultimate
aim of studying nature, as Thomas Aquinas had shown in his great
theological synthesis, was to understand God. The culmination of

this approach appeared in the seventeenth and early eighteenth cen-
turies, in the physical theologies of René Descartes, Isaac Newton,
and John Ray.
This synthesis achieved a late expression in the poetry of Erasmus
Darwin, Charles’s grandfather, whose works from the end of the
eighteenth century began from the sexuality of plants to show that
nature was ascending an evolutionary ladder through laws sustained
by a benevolent deity. To ‘darwinize’ in Regency England was to
write verses like these:
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet and wing.
5
In Protestant Europe and America, a belief that God’s attributes
and existence could be inferred from the natural world retained excep-
tional potency, as indicated by sales of the Revd William Paley’s
Natural Theology for decades following its publication in 1802. Paley
argued that the natural world, like the watch in the book’s cele brated
opening, displayed intelligent design in every aspect of its construction.
The anatomy of the eye, for example, demonstrated complete mastery
5
E. Darwin, The Temple of Nature (London, 1803), ll. 295 – 302.
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xvi
of the same optical laws that an instrument maker used for design-
ing telescopes. Lenses of different shapes and sizes had been pro-

vided for creatures with different ways of life, while focusing was
managed by exquisitely delicate muscles.
6
Paley’s God was the ideal
utilitarian engineer, whose creations were so perfect that transmuta-
tion was unnecessary. Even poverty, illness, and other trials of
human existence were part of the divine plan; if we were too happy,
we might not look to Christ for salvation. Evidence of adaptation was
everywhere.
Around the time that Paley and Erasmus Darwin wrote, the
centuries-old system of organizing knowledge about the natural
world was being transformed. The division between natural philoso-
phy and natural history began to break down, replaced by a focus on
new fields such as geology, physiology, and physics that aimed to
analyse the workings of nature. The new disciplines created a cadre
of experts, important for the state and economy. The jars in cabinets
of curiosities were broken open, with specimens dissected to show
how they functioned to produce the totality of a living organism. The
classification of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, which
employed a self-confessedly ‘artificial’ method based on sexual char-
acters, was gradually replaced by ‘natural’ systems using a combin-
ation of features. New theories stressed the location of organisms in
space and time, showing how their internal workings meshed with
the external environment. Above all, enquiry into nature began to be
distinguished from the overall goal of understanding God. Beginning
in the eighteenth century, it began to be possible to pursue the study of
the natural world without reference to an understanding of the divine.
Theology, once the ‘queen of the sciences’, could be seen as separate
and distinct.
In the wake of the French Revolution, the politics of knowledge

became acutely sensitive, especially in Britain where an Evangelical
revival of Christianity was in progress. The terror of the guillotine
and the destruction of the Church were attributed to the misuse
of rational learning, and the notion that organisms somehow evol ved
into other forms was condemned not only as dangerous but incre d-
ible. Erasmus Darwin’s versifying was ridiculed and the late-
Enlightenment Parisian transmutationist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was
dismissed as a wild speculator; as Lyell damningly said, Lamarck’s
6
W. Paley, Natural Theology (1802; Oxford 2006), esp. pp. 7 – 26.
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