Showing 21–32 of 32 items
The Charles Darwin Collection
The Darwin Correspondence Project is publishing letters written by and to the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Complete transcripts of letters are being made available through the Project’s website (www.darwinproject.ac.uk) after publication in the ongoing print edition of The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge University Press 1985–). Metadata and summaries of all known letters (c. 15,000) appear in Ɛpsilon, and the full texts of available letters can also be searched, with links to the full texts.
Asks LJ which British birds are polygamous. His query relates to the possession by the male of secondary sexual characters.
CD is also interested in the numerical proportion of the sexes in birds.
Asks about the use of the horns in male lamellicorn or coprophagous beetles.
Thanks LJ for his useful facts. Will "look to" the reference about the nightingale.
Doctors predict it will take years for CD’s constitution to recover.
Details regarding volume on Fish.
Sends notes on Diodon.
Must give up attending Geological Society evening meetings; knocks him up.
CD is pleased with LJ’s introduction [to Fish]. He rejoices that he persuaded LJ to undertake this work.
Glad to hear that LJ will repeat his notes to Gilbert White’s [Natural history of] Selborne [1843] in a separate work.
Critical of G. R. Gray’s attaching his own name to Furnarius cunicularius [in Birds, pp. 65–6]. Strickland’s nomenclature laws are needed to check egoism.
Is sending fish skins and bottles off to Cambridge Philosophical Society.
Fish numbers [of Zoology], now finished, give CD satisfaction when he doubts whether he ought to have applied for Government money.
Wishes Thomas Bell would finish his part [Reptiles].
CD has just corrected last page of index of Coral reefs.
Asks whether LJ can throw light on this subject: "What are the checks and what the periods of life by which the increase of any given species is limited?" CD has been driven to conclude that species are mutable; allied species are co-descendants from common stocks.
On checks to increase of species and the observations which led him to regard species as mutable in form. Would welcome "at some future time" LJ’s criticism of the "sketch" of his conclusions.
Discusses checks on growth of species population; use of term "mutation" in his species theory. His belief in species mutability.
Thanks LB for his essay on local biology.
CD with much care and discomfort is now able to work a few hours almost every day.
Looks forward to LJ’s volume [Observations in natural history (1846)].
Observations on what the world would call trifling points in natural history are always very interesting to him. Deplores their absence in foreign periodicals.
Is slaving away to finish S. American geology.