Charles Darwin - The Foundations of the Origin of Species

The author doubtless meant that the complex relationships between organisms can be roughly represented by a net in which the knots stand for species.

Between the lines occurs: – “one «?» form be lost.”

The original sentence is here broken up by the insertion of: – “out of the dust of Java, Sumatra, these «?» allied to past and present age and «illegible», with the stamp of inutility in some of their organs and conversion in others.”

Between the lines occur the words: – “Species vary according to same general laws as varieties; they cross according to same laws.”

“A cross with a bull-dog has affected for many generations the courage and obstinacy of greyhounds,” Origin , Ed. i. p. 214, vi. p. 327.

The simile of the savage and the ship occurs in the Origin , Ed. i. p. 485, vi. p. 665.

In the Origin , Ed. i. p. 486, vi. p. 665, the author speaks of the “summing up of many contrivances”: I have therefore introduced the above words which make the passage clearer. In the Origin the comparison is with “a great mechanical invention,” – not with a work of art.

See a similar passage in the Origin , Ed. i. p. 487, vi. p. 667.

See the Origin , Ed. i. p. 488, vi. p. 668.

The following discussion, together with some memoranda are on the last page of the MS. “The supposed creative spirit does not create either number or kind which «are» from analogy adapted to site (viz. New Zealand): it does not keep them all permanently adapted to any country, – it works on spots or areas of creation, – it is not persistent for great periods, – it creates forms of same groups in same regions, with no physical similarity, – it creates, on islands or mountain summits, species allied to the neighbouring ones, and not allied to alpine nature as shown in other mountain summits – even different on different island of similarly constituted archipelago, not created on two points: never mammifers created on small isolated island; nor number of organisms adapted to locality: its power seems influenced or related to the range of other species wholly distinct of the same genus, – it does not equally effect, in amount of difference, all the groups of the same class.”

This passage is the ancestor of the concluding words in the first edition of the Origin of Species which have remained substantially unchanged throughout subsequent editions, “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” In the 2nd edition “by the Creator” is introduced after “originally breathed.”

Compare the Origin , Ed. i. p. 481, vi. p. 659, “The difficulty is the same as that felt by so many geologists, when Lyell first insisted that long lines of inland cliffs had been formed, and great valleys excavated, by the slow action of the coast-waves.”

The cumulative effect of domestication is insisted on in the Origin , see e. g. Origin , Ed. i. p. 7, vi. p. 8.

This type of variation passes into what he describes as the direct effect of conditions. Since they are due to causes acting during the adult life of the organism they might be called individual variations, but he uses this term for congenital variations, e. g. the differences discoverable in plants raised from seeds of the same pod ( Origin , Ed. i. p. 45, vi. p. 53).

«It is not clear where the following note is meant to come»: Case of Orchis, – most remarkable as not long cultivated by seminal propagation. Case of varieties which soon acquire, like Ægilops and Carrot (and Maize) a certain general character and then go on varying.

Here, as in the MS. of 1842, the author is inclined to minimise the variation occurring in nature.

This is more strongly stated than in the Origin , Ed. i. p. 30.

See Origin , Ed. i. p. 13.

Origin , Ed. i. p. 86, vi. p. 105.

It is interesting to find that though the author, like his contemporaries, believed in the inheritance of acquired characters, he excluded the case of mutilation.

This corresponds to Origin , Ed. i. p. 10, vi. p. 9.

Origin , Ed. i. p. 8, vi. p. 10.

For plasticity see Origin , Ed. i. pp. 12, 132.

Var. under Dom. , Ed. ii. I. p. 393.

Selection is here used in the sense of isolation, rather than as implying the summation of small differences. Professor Henslow in his Heredity of Acquired Characters in Plants , 1908, p. 2, quotes from Darwin’s Var. under Dom. , Ed. i. II. p. 271, a passage in which the author, speaking of the direct action of conditions, says: – “A new sub-variety would thus be produced without the aid of selection.” Darwin certainly did not mean to imply that such varieties are freed from the action of natural selection, but merely that a new form may appear without summation of new characters. Professor Henslow is apparently unaware that the above passage is omitted in the second edition of Var. under Dom. , II. p. 260.

See the Essay of 1842, p. 3.

See Origin , Ed. i. p. 33, vi. p. 38. The evidence is given in the present Essay rather more fully than in the Origin .

Journal of Researches , Ed. 1860, p. 214. “Doggies catch otters, old women no.”

The effects of crossing is much more strongly stated here than in the Origin . See Ed. i. p. 20, vi. p. 23, where indeed the opposite point of view is given. His change of opinion may be due to his work on pigeons. The whole of the discussion on crossing corresponds to Chapter VIII of the Origin , Ed. i. rather than to anything in the earlier part of the book.

The parallelism between the effects of a cross and the effects of conditions is given from a different point of view in the Origin , Ed. i. p. 266, vi. p. 391. See the experimental evidence for this important principle in the author’s work on Cross and Self-Fertilisation . Professor Bateson has suggested that the experiments should be repeated with gametically pure plants.