The Red Notebook

Those frankly wonderful people at the Darwin Correspondence Project have announced the publication of volume 17 of their stupendously researched series of books. The latest volume contains the full texts of more than 500 letters Darwin wrote and received during the year 1869. The project has also announced that volume 15 of the correspondence is now online.

Forget all the biographies, and Darwin’s own Autobiography; if you want to get to know the real Charles Darwin, you should be reading his correspondence.

I don’t have many ambitions in life, but one of them is to live long enough to read the complete set of Darwin’s correspondence. To be frank, it’s touch-and-go whether I’ll make it: they aren’t exactly knocking these books out once a fortnight. It has taken 23 years to publish the first 17 volumes, and there will be approximately 30 volumes in the complete series. The final volume is due to be published around 2025.

My suddenly (and alarmingly) incomplete set of volumes of Darwin’s Correspondence

I’ll be off to my local bookshop to order my copy of volume 17 this morning.

Last week, I finished reading volume 7 of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin, which deals with the years 1858–1859 (i.e. the lead-up to the publication of On the Origin of Species). As with all the other volumes in the series, it is a magnifient piece of research work, and a must-buy for any Darwin groupie.

Expect several posts over the next few weeks inspired by this fantastic book.

Yesterday, as I was trying to photograph bees on some unknown shrub in my garden, I noticed that none of the bees was actually entering the flowers of the shrub; the flowers were too small to accomodate the bees’ bodies. Instead, the bees appeared to be drinking nectar from the flowers by biting holes through the outside of the flowers. After a while, I noticed that some of the bees weren’t biting new holes, but were revisiting old ones.

Then I vaguely remembered reading about such behaviour somewhere in Darwin’s correspondence. A quick search later, and there it was. Darwin had written to the Gardeners’ Chronicle magazine to elaborate on earlier observations made by other readers:

Darwin, C. R. to Gardeners’ Chronicle, [16 Aug 1841]

Perhaps some of your readers may like to hear a few more particulars about the humble-bees which bore holes in flowers, and thus extract the nectar. This operation has been performed on a large scale in the Zoological Gardens […] I observed some plants of Marvel of Peru, and of Salvia coccinea, with holes in similar positions; […] I first noticed them a week since, when, from the brown colour of their edges, they appeared to have been made some time before. The beds of Stachys and Pentstemon are frequented by numerous humble-bees of many very different kinds; at one moment I saw between twenty and thirty round a bed of the latter flower; they fly very quickly from flower to flower, and always alight with their heads just over the little orifices, into which they most dexterously insert their proboscis, and in the case of the Pentstemon, first into the orifice on one side and then into the other, so that they thus extract the nectar on both sides of the germen. […]—C.

BBC: Darwin’s letters archived on web

… The Darwin Correspondence project has existed offline since 1974. It has so far published 15 volumes of the scientist’s letters as books.

An agreement with the publisher of the books means the new website will offer digitised versions of the texts freely available to anyone four years behind the hard copies.

Yet more fantastic news about Darwin material going online.

I’ve been linking to various letters on the Darwin Correspondence website over the last few weeks, but this is a major launch of new material, including the letters from Volume 1 of the correspondence (previously missing from the website), which includes all Darwin’s letters from the Beagle voyage. And they’ve even introduced some RSS feeds. Woot!

Unfortunately, the relaunch also involved relocating the material to a brand new domain, which means all my earlier links are now broken. I’ll fix them as soon as I can.

Missing links on a Darwinian weblog, eh? Oh the irony!

Postscript: Missing links now fixed.

There’s something strangely comforting in reading that geniuses occasionally have to worry about mundane matters, such as the state of their teeth:

Charles Darwin to his cousin William Darwin Fox, 24th October, 1852

[…] Farewell,—do come whenever you can possibly manage it. I cannot but hope that the Carbuncle may possibly do you good: I have heard of all sorts of weaknesses disappearing after a carbuncle: I suppose the pain is dreadful. I agree most entirely, what a blessed discovery is Chloroform: when one thinks of one’s children, it makes quite a little difference in ones happiness. The other day I had 5 grinders (two by the Elevator) out at a sitting under this wonderful substance, & felt hardly anything.

My dear old Friend
Yours very affectionately
Charles Darwin

Darwin was a great proponent of the new miracle substance chloroform, whose anaesthetic properties were first discovered by Scottish obstetrician James Young Simpson in 1847.

The Darwins were also very early adopters of chloroform. In 1848, just a year after Simpson first used it, Darwin’s wife, Emma is believed to have received chloroform during the birth of their son, Frances. She was to receive chloroform during all her subsequent acts of labour. Indeed, so impressed was he with chloroform’s miraculous powers that Darwin (who, in his youth, had trained to be a doctor) wasn’t beyond administering it to his wife himself, if a suitably qualified doctor wasn’t available. During the birth of their son Leonard in 1850, as Darwin reported to his friend John Stevens Henslow:

I was so bold during my wifes confinement which are always rapid, as to administer Chloroform, before the Dr . came & I kept her in a state of insensibility of 1 & ½ hours & she knew nothing from first pain till she heard that the child was born.—It is the grandest & most blessed of discoveries.

The use of chloroform during childbirth was highly controversial (which is hardly surprising, bearing in mind how new it was). But, as we have seen, Darwin was quick to recommend it to his friends. In 1854, his friend Joseph Dalton Hooker reported:

My dear Darwin

I did give the Chloroform as before & with the best effect, though the Doctor was horribly prejudiced against it: & he having delv’d. 3–4000 women without it that is perhaps not to be wondered at.

It is hard to imagine such a revolutionary, new medical treatment being adopted quite so quickly these days—and for very good reasons. The Victorian faith in science, admirable though it was compared to today, does seem to have sometimes bordered on the reckless.

Note: The ever excellent BBC Radio 4 series, In Our Time, recently discussed the history of anaesthetics. You can listen to the programme again (in crappy RealPlayer™ format) here.