The Correspondence of Charles Darwin: Volume 13, 1865

Description

The Correspondence of Charles Darwin provides, for the first time, full, authoritative texts of all known and available letters to and from Charles Darwin. The letters are accompanied by detailed explanatory footnotes and supplementary materials, and offer unparalleled insight into Darwin's experiments, thoughts, friendships, and family life. Volume 13 of this continuing series contains letters for 1865, when Darwin published his long paper on climbing plants and continued working on his book, The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication. In this year, Robert FitzRoy, former captain of HMS Beagle, committed suicide; Darwin's great friend Joseph Dalton Hooker became director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; and Charles Lyell and John Lubbock quarrelled over an alleged incident of plagiarism. The volume also contains a supplement of over 100 letters discovered or redated since the series began publication, including a fascinating collection of letters written when Darwin was 12.

'Nothing in recent history of science quite tops the achievement of the volumes of Darwin correspondence. It is our own Human Genome Project.' Annals of Science 'Previous volumes have already provided a goldmine of information not only for Darwin scholars but for any researcher interested in the Victorian period, particularly Victorian science.' Isis 'The letters ... are written in elegant and extraordinarily polite terms. They are a delight on those grounds alone although they could daunt modern readers ... the main effect of this book, though, is astonishment at the staggering effort the five editors put into it.' Roy Herbert, New Scientist '... every real science library needs this series.' TRENDS in Ecology and Evolution