This, as can have escaped hardly anyone’s awareness, is the week of celebrating the birth of Charles Darwin, 200 years ago. I do not pretend to be any kind of Darwinian expert, and there is much being written elsewhere during this festival, so I shall not burden cyberspace with my own ramblings. Far better, I thought, to let the man speak for himself - as a geologist. For a geologist he was, and an enthusiastic one at that, throughout his life - as an old friend and Darwin devotee in the States wrote to me recently, “I have no doubt that his thinking was fundamentally influenced as much by his geological investigations as it was by Malthusian principles.” Darwin’s correspondence is now, awe-inspiringly, available online, 14,500 letters, searchable, annotated, and cross-referenced. It is completely engrossing, and I have been spending some time listening to him write about geology. Over the course of the next few days I will simply post some of my favourite extracts.
Written from Mauritius in 1836 to his sister, Caroline:
I am in high spirits about my geology.—& even aspire to the hope that, my observations will be considered of some utility by real geologists.
And, again to Caroline, impecuniously from Montevideo in 1833:
And here comes the whole purport of my letter, to announce more extravagance.— I have really now been struggling for a whole week, but there is a very interesting geological formation on the coast of the Uruguay, & every day I hear of more facts respecting it.— When I think I never shall be in this country again, I cannot bear to miss seeing one of the most curious pieces of Geology.— I wish any of you could enter into my feelings of excessive pleasure, which Geology gives, as soon as one partly understands the nature of a country.— I have drawn a bill for 50£.— I well know, that considering my outfit I have spent this year far more than I ought to do.— I should be very glad if my Father would make a real account against me, as he often says jokingly.— I hope he will not think I say this impertinently: The sort of interest I take in this voyage, is so different a feeling to any thing I ever knew before, that, as in this present instance I have made arrangements for starting, all the time knowing I have no business to do it.
[the Darwin correspondence is at http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/index.php; see also http://darwin-online.org.uk/acknowledgements.html; Ian Stimpson’s blog has a post on Darwin the Geologist, with links to the Darwin geological papers made openly available by The Geological Society: http://hypocentre.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/darwin-the-geologist/; Pools and Riffles has a link through to Darwin’s geological cross-sections of South America: http://poolsandriffles.blogspot.com/2009/02/map-monday-10-darwins-south-america.html]
Comments
No comments yet.