Charles Darwin - The Foundations of the Origin of Species

See the extracts in Life and Letters of Charles Darwin , ii. p. 5.

The second volume, – especially important in regard to Evolution, – reached him in the autumn of 1832, as Prof. Judd has pointed out in his most interesting paper in Darwin and Modern Science . Cambridge, 1909.

Obituary Notice of C. Darwin, Proc. R. Soc. vol. 44. Reprinted in Huxley's Collected Essays . See also Life and Letters of C. Darwin , ii. p. 179.

See the extracts in the Life and Letters , ii. p. 5.

Life and Letters , i. p. 82.

Obituary Notice , loc. cit.

Darwin and Modern Science.

Huxley, Obituary , p. xi.

In this citation the italics are mine.

Journal of Researches , Ed. 1860, p. 394.

F. Darwin’s Life of Charles Darwin (in one volume), 1892, p. 166.

Life and Letters , i. p. 83.

Life and Letters , ii. p. 8.

Avestruz Petise, i. e. Rhea Darwini .

A bird.

Life and Letters , i. p. 84.

It contains as a fact 231 pp. It is a strongly bound folio, interleaved with blank pages, as though for notes and additions. His own MS. from which it was copied contains 189 pp.

Life and Letters , ii. p. 116.

Life and Letters , ii. p. 10.

Life and Letters , ii. p. 146.

J. Linn. Soc. Zool. iii. p. 45.

It is evident that Parts and Chapters were to some extent interchangeable in the author’s mind, for p. 1 (of the MS. we have been discussing) is headed in ink Chapter I, and afterwards altered in pencil to Part I.

On p. 23 of the MS. of the Foundations is a reference to the “back of p. 21 bis”: this suggests that additional pages had been interpolated in the MS. and that it may once have had 37 in place of 35 pp.

Life and Letters , i. p. 153.

Life and Letters , i. p. 84.

In the footnotes to the Essay of 1844 attention is called to similar passages.

Life and Letters , ii. p. 15.

The passage is given in the Life and Letters , ii. p. 124.

The extract consists of the section on Natural Means of Selection , p. 87.

Life and Letters , i. p. 84.

Life and Letters , ii. p. 18.

Mrs Darwin’s brother.

After Mr Strickland’s name comes the following sentence, which has been erased, but remains legible. “Professor Owen would be very good; but I presume he would not undertake such a work.”

The words “several years ago, and” seem to have been added at a later date.

Life and Letters , ii. p. 9.

Evidently a memorandum that an example should be given.

The importance of exposure to new conditions for several generations is insisted on in the Origin , Ed. i. p. 7, also p. 131. In the latter passage the author guards himself against the assumption that variations are “due to chance,” and speaks of “our ignorance of the cause of each particular variation.” These statements are not always remembered by his critics.

Cf. Origin , Ed. i. p. 10, vi. p. 9, “Young of the same litter, sometimes differ considerably from each other, though both the young and the parents, as Müller has remarked, have apparently been exposed to exactly the same conditions of life.”

This is paralleled by the conclusion in the Origin , Ed. i. p. 8, that “the most frequent cause of variability may be attributed to the male and female reproductive elements having been affected prior to the act of conception.”

The meaning seems to be that there must be some variability in the liver otherwise anatomists would not speak of the ‘beau ideal’ of that organ.

The position of the following passage is uncertain. “If individuals of two widely different varieties be allowed to cross, a third race will be formed – a most fertile source of the variation in domesticated animals. «In the Origin , Ed. i. p. 20 the author says that “the possibility of making distinct races by crossing has been greatly exaggerated.”» If freely allowed, the characters of pure parents will be lost, number of races thus «illegible» but differences «?» besides the «illegible». But if varieties differing in very slight respects be allowed to cross, such small variation will be destroyed, at least to our senses, – a variation [clearly] just to be distinguished by long legs will have offspring not to be so distinguished. Free crossing great agent in producing uniformity in any breed. Introduce tendency to revert to parent form.”

The swamping effect of intercrossing is referred to in the Origin , Ed. i. p. 103, vi. p. 126.

A discussion on the intercrossing of hermaphrodites in relation to Knight’s views occurs in the Origin , Ed. i. p. 96, vi. p. 119. The parallelism between crossing and changed conditions is briefly given in the Origin , Ed. i. p. 267, vi. p. 391, and was finally investigated in The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom , 1876.

There is an article on the vis medicatrix in Brougham’s Dissertations , 1839, a copy of which is in the author’s library.

This is the classification of selection into methodical and unconscious given in the Origin , Ed. i. p. 33, vi. p. 38.

This passage, and a similar discussion on the power of the Creator (p. 6), correspond to the comparison between the selective capacities of man and nature, in the Origin , Ed. i. p. 83, vi. p. 102.

i. e. they are individually distinguishable.

See Origin , Ed. i. p. 133, vi. p. 165.

When the author wrote this sketch he seems not to have been so fully convinced of the general occurrence of variation in nature as he afterwards became. The above passage in the text possibly suggests that at this time he laid more stress on sports or mutations than was afterwards the case.

The author may possibly have taken the case of the woodpecker from Buffon, Histoire Nat. des Oiseaux , T. vii. p. 3, 1780, where however it is treated from a different point of view. He uses it more than once, see for instance Origin , Ed. i. pp. 3, 60, 184, vi. pp. 3, 76, 220. The passage in the text corresponds with a discussion on the woodpecker and the mistletoe in Origin , Ed. i. p. 3, vi. p. 3.