On the Origin of Species. Charles Darwin. With an introduction by Ernst Mayr. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1964 (facsimile of the first edition, 1859). x + 502 pp. $5.95

Science ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 146 (3640) ◽  
pp. 51-52
Author(s):  
G. de Beer
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
Ernst Mayr ◽  
Origin Of Species

William Yarrell (1784–1856), friend and adviser to Charles Darwin

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-114
Author(s):  
Christine E. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Beagle Voyage

For 25 years, from 1831 into 1856, the English zoologist William Yarrell was both a friend and adviser to Charles Darwin. He was regarded by Darwin as a wise and eminent naturalist of the older generation. Yarrell was part of a small group of naturalists, including Leonard Jenyns and John Stevens Henslow, whose interests in ornithology, entomology and geology expanded over the years. Their knowledge helped to support publication of the results of the HMS Beagle voyage and to inform Darwin while he was developing his hypotheses on evolution before the publication of On the Origin of Species, first published in 1859.

‘Short-Spanned Living Creatures’: Evolutionary Perspectives in Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely, but Too Well (1867)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Aaron Green
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Simple Structure ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
Crystal Palace ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Evolutionary Perspectives

Abstract In Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Charles Lyell appraised the distinct contribution made by his protégé, Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species (1859)), to evolutionary theory: ‘Progression … is not a necessary accompaniment of variation and natural selection [… Darwin’s theory accounts] equally well for what is called degradation, or a retrogressive movement towards a simple structure’. In Rhoda Broughton’s first novel, Not Wisely, but Too Well (1867), written contemporaneously with Lyell’s book, the Crystal Palace at Sydenham prompts precisely this sort of Darwinian ambivalence to progress; but whether British civilization ‘advance[s] or retreat[s]’, her narrator adds that this prophesized state ‘will not be in our days’ – its realization exceeds the single lifespan. This article argues that Not Wisely, but Too Well is attentive to the irreconcilability of Darwinism to the Victorian ‘idea of progress’: Broughton’s novel, distinctly from its peers, raises the retrogressive and nihilistic potentials of Darwin’s theory and purposes them to reflect on the status of the individual in mid-century Britain.

Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Ashton
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Benjamin Disraeli ◽  
Origin Of Species ◽  
Aged Forty

This prologue describes events that occurred in the lives of Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Disraeli in the summer of 1858. The publication in November 1859 of Darwin's groundbreaking Origin of Species, had its catalyst in June 1858. That was when Darwin, fearing that he might lose precedence by continuing to delay publication of his painstaking researches, was galvanised into writing up his findings quickly and having them published in one readable volume. For Dickens, the summer of 1858 was one of horror. Aged forty-six and already the famous author of several successful novels, he lost his head and publicly advertised his separation from Catherine, his wife of twenty-two years, while disclaiming rumours of a relationship with either his sister-in-law or an actress aged nineteen. He acted impulsively and brutally, losing friends, dismissing his publishers, causing anguish to his wife and children. As for Disraeli, he became chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Derby's reforming Tory government.

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