An Annotated Calendar of the Letters of Charles Darwin in the Library of the American Philosophical Society, American Philosophical Society

Foreword

The Library of the American Philosophical Society took its first step toward assembling a collection of manuscripts and books relating to Charles Darwin and evolution in 1950. In that year, at the suggestion of William E. Lingelbach and with the support of Edwin G. Conklin, librarian and president respectively, the Society purchased at auction in London 177 letters from Darwin to Sir Charles Lyell and some 277 more to Lyell from other British and European scientists. Copies of the letters were deposited in the British Museum, and the originals became the nucleus of the Society's Darwin collection. (See Edwin G. Conklin, "Letters of Charles Darwin and Other Scientists and Philosophers to Sir Charles Lyell, Bart.," Proc. Am. Phil. Soc., 95 (1951): 220-22.)

To extend the collection Dr. Lingelbach asked the assistance of Dr. Loren C. Eiseley, who was then writing Darwin's Century. For some years Dr. Eiseley systematically scanned catalogues, made lists of desiderata, and, on visits to booksellers here and in England, purchased books by and about Darwin. Meanwhile the Library continued to acquire letters of Charles Darwin and other 19th century naturalists until it now has almost 700 by Darwin alone.

In 1973, the preparation of a calendar was begun by the Library in the belief that scholars could use a guide that was something more than a list but short of fully edited transcriptions of the Darwin letters. The work has been supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and it is now published with the approval of Mr. George P. Darwin.

The calendar was prepared by P. Thomas Carroll. Besides providing concise descriptions of the contents of unpublished letters, Mr. Carroll has indicated when changes were made in published versions, corrected erroneous transcriptions and added notes. A particularly important contribution of this calendar is the method Mr. Carroll and a colleague, Professor Thaddeus Trenn, have devised for dating the letters more accurately. All Darwin scholars are familiar with this difficult problem and all of them will appreciate help with it.

The present volume contains a substantial portion (about 15%) of all the Darwin letters that have so far been located. A search is now in progress to find as many more as possible for a "Collected Letters of Charles Darwin" of which I am a Co-Editor with Dr. Sydney Smith of St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. On the basis of my experience, I can attest to the skill and thoroughness with which Mr. Carroll has dealt with the many difficulties that confront an editor of Darwin's correspondence.

Scholarly interest in Darwin has been growing steadily in recent years and the Library of the American Philosophical Society has become a center of Darwin research on this side of the Atlantic. The present volume is thus a welcome introduction to a collection that has become an indispensable resource for research on the life and work of Charles Darwin and the history of the theory of evolution.

Frederick Burkhardt

Introduction

The profound influence of the thought of Charles Darwin on contemporary scientific culture stems largely from his theory of natural selection, the first widely accepted mechanism to account for organismal evolutionary change. A product of Victorian preconceptions of the order of nature and the nature of change, both Darwin and his theories have proven remarkably resilient and remain a vital heuristic in the biological sciences.

The son of the physician Robert Darwin, Charles Darwin was blessed with a pair of illustrious grandfathers from the progressive elite of British Whiggery, the savant and proto-evolutionist, Erasmus Darwin, and the manufacturer of ceramics, Josiah Wedgwood. Born in Shrewsbury on February 12, 1809, Charles entered the University of Edinburgh at age sixteen, intending to follow in his father's footsteps into medicine, but he proved as unmotivated a student as he was unenthusiastic. Repulsed by the experience of attending surgeries undertaken in the absence of anaesthetics, Darwin abandoned his already half-hearted commitment to medicine and in 1827, he left Edinburgh for Christ's College, Cambridge, to study for the ministry.

The change of venue did little to rouse Darwin's enthusiasm for coursework, however at Cambridge, he met three men whose enthusiasm for nature sparked his imagination. With the great geologist, Charles Lyell, Darwin undertook field excursions to south Wales and was introduced to the concept of uniformitarianism; with F.W. Hope, he spent the summer of 1829 collecting bugs and beetles; while the botanist John Stevens Henslow encouraged his interest in the natural sciences, but equally importantly introduced him to Captain Robert Fitz-Roy. After receiving his degree in 1831, Darwin signed on as naturalist aboard Fitz-Roy's H.M.S. Beagle on its cruise around the world. Summarizing Darwin's subsequent career would be an exercise in courting claims to insufficiency while guaranteeing inadequacy, yet

Returning home from the Beagle in 1836, Darwin began in earnest to write and publish in natural history. His first paper, speculating on the origin of coral atolls, was begun in December 1835, and he began his first notebook on theories relating to the transmutation of species in July 1837, only two months after presenting his coral atoll paper at the Geological Society. Financial pressures were not a concern for the well-heeled Darwin, particularly after marrying his wealthy first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, in January 1839, and from the late 1830s onward, Darwin was able to lead an gentleman's life devoted to the pursuit of science, interrupted on occasion by illness and family concerns.

Darwin's first major monograph, his Journal of Researches (London: H. Colburn, 1839), was an important record of the geological and natural historical observations made during his voyage aboard the Beagle, and was a huge popular success. Since his visit to the Galapagos aboard the Beagle, however, Darwin had been percolating with ideas on the transmutation of species, an idea that had concerned his grandfather Erasmus before him. According to Darwin's retelling of the events, his ideas began to gel after reading Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, which confirmed his predilection for viewing nature as a struggle for existence in which "favourable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavourable ones to be destroyed." Malthusian logic, he believed, would lead one to conclude that the end result would be the differential reproduction of animal populations based upon the characteristics each possessed, leading ultimately to speciation. By the early 1840s, Darwinian natural selection was beginning to germinate.

Yet still he sat. Darwin's research during the 1840s and early 1850s included brushes with the evolutionist thought of the botanist J.D. Hooker, the cosmic Robert Chambers and others, and in 1842, he sketched out the rudiments of his theory, thinking enough of it to have it copied two years later. His ardor for publishing on the topic may have been cooled by the hostility he saw meted out to Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural Creation (1844), but his attention was also divided -- barnacles and migraines were as much part of Darwin's decades as natural selection. Even the appearance in 1855 of Alfred Russel Wallace's "On the Law Which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species" in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History did little to prod Darwin onward, nor did the intervention of his old mentor, Charles Lyell, speed the pen. It was not until 1858 that Darwin moved forward, having receiving a letter from Wallace informing him that Malthus's Essay had illuminated his thinking on the origin of species, and enclosing a manuscript for comment that outlined a theory with a strong, coincidental resemblance to Darwin's own. Fearful of losing any claim to priority, Darwin had his 1844 essay and Wallace's published jointly in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society in August 1858, and he proceeded feverishly (often literally so) to work on a longer "abstract" of his ideas, the work that became his magnum opus, On the Origin of Species (London: J. Murray, 1859).

In the spectacular sequence of books that followed, Darwin elucidated various aspects of the theory of natural selection, progressing with increasing confidence through The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (London: J.Murray, 1868), The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: J. Murray, 1871); and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals (London: J. Murray, 1872). Lacking, as he admitted, in any coherent theory of heredity, Darwin's natural selection nevertheless provided a persuasive explanation of the mechanics of organismal change. While the response to natural selection was not uniformly warm, perhaps even providing impetus to Lamarckian theories of inheritance, it was chiefly responsible for establishing evolutionary change as an integral part of biological explanation. The broader implications of Darwin's thought, including the role of contingency, relativism, and stochasticity in organismal change continue to define biological interests. More subtly, his ideas catalyzed a slow shift away from typological thinking (imaging the organism with respect to a perfect "type") toward viewing organisms in the context of a population, an attitudinal adjustment with profound implications for the practice of science in the twentieth century.

Darwin continued with research and writing until the time of his death on April 19, 1882. His last work was the quirky, fascinating, and perhaps prophetic book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms (London: J. Murray 1882).

The Darwin Papers at the American Philosophical Society represent approximately 15% of the surviving correspondence of the British evolutionary theorist, Charles Darwin. Consisting chiefly of correspondence between Darwin and other scientists writing on subjects from natural selection and the theory of evolution to the controversy caused by On the Origin of Species, the Darwin Papers.

The earliest accession of Darwin Papers at the APS consisted of an extensive and important series of letters between Darwin and his colleague and mentor, Charles Lyell, that frame the development of their thought from the late 1830s into the 1870s. There is a wealth of other important correspondence in the collection with John Thomas Gulick, George John Romanes, and Philip Lutley Sclater, among others.

This collection includes photostats of letters from Walsh to Darwin, in the Chicago Museum of Natural History, and photostats of Darwin manuscripts in possession of Dr. Robert M. Stecher, Cleveland, Ohio.

Relevance of the Darwin Calendar

Thousands of pages have been written about Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882), whose Origin of Species laid the foundation for modern evolutionary theory. Even so, our picture of Darwin and our assessment of his place in history are undergoing constant revision. Relatively speaking, we are, after all, only recently accustomed to the notion that we share a common ancestry with apes, and few outside the biological professions yet appreciate the sweeping implications of population thinking (as opposed to typological thinking) or the concept of ecology. The social and political significance of Darwin's work will probably be debated for some time to come. Many historians of science are interested in the processes by which Darwin's ideas were formulated, disseminated, and ultimately accepted by scientists and by laymen. Scientists continue to be enlightened by reading Darwin¹ and publication of transcriptions of Darwin's various manuscripts occurs regularly.²

Given these developments, as well as the added stimulus provided by the 1959 centennial of the publication of the Origin, it seems certain that research and writing upon Darwin will continue, with scholars demanding access to ever more records of Darwin's life and work. This calendar was prepared with this demand in mind, so that readers may better interpret the significance of this great naturalist's achievements and those of his colleagues.

The five remaining sections of this introduction explain in a general way the design and the intended utility of the calendar. They discuss the following topics: 1)the primary importance of letters in the assessment of Darwin's life and work; 2) the justification for publishing these letters; 3) the nature of the Darwin letters collection at the Library of the American Philosophical Society; 4) the reasons for publishing the letters in the more-or-less unfashionable calendar format; and 5) the unique problems encountered in dating the letters. A rather extensive and detailed statement of the editorial method employed in this calendar follows the introduction.

Darwin's Letters

Modern man, armed with the telephone and often inundated with bureaucratic paperwork, might find it hard to comprehend how important letters were to life among the literate elite of the nineteenth century, and how valuable these nineteenth-century letters now are to scholars. But Darwin's contemporaries knew well the value of letters; Thomas Jefferson put the point succinctly in 1823 when he argued that "the letters of a person, especially of one whose business has been chiefly transacted by letters, form the only full and genuine journal of his life."³ This was especially true of scientists and other scholars of the day, for whom communication of the written word was such an integral part of intellectual activity.

Letters are particularly significant in Darwin's case. Physically isolated at Down House for most of his life and often immobilized by chronic illness, Darwin depended more heavily than others upon letters as his principal mode of communication. Moreover, because correspondence was Darwin's usual medium of contact with his closest friends, his letters often exhibit a degree of candor about his life and work not revealed clearly in any of his other papers and publications -- not even in the intimate Autobiography which, though written for his own satisfaction and the entertainment of his children, lacked the presence of daily communication and was tempered somewhat by the restraints of Darwin's time and class.⁴

Finally, the unusually heterogeneous quality of the Darwin letters reveal better than any other of the records of his life the diversity of his daily routine and the catholicity of his interests and preoccupations.

Scholars who examine the record of Darwin's life contained in his letters can expect to find many types of information. For the historian of science with a bent toward the history of ideas, there is abundant material on Darwin's scientific views. Sometimes a passage in a letter clarifies or corrects a claim in one of Darwin's published works; for example, in a letter to Charles Lyell in 1860, Darwin is tempering a rather extreme contention, which he had written into the Origin, when he writes that "Ammonites have become wholly extinct in a remarkably sudden manner relatively to most other families [and not absolutely, as implied in the Origin]; I meant only this [in the Origin], but I see I have not been nearly guarded enough."⁵ At other times Darwin retracts assertions made in previous letters; in some cases only the earlier, unamended claim has been published, so that the unsuspecting scholar may be misled if he does not peruse carefully the unpublished materials.⁶

Occasionally, a Darwin letter will contain opinions and theories not yet expressed in print, or at least not yet expressed as well as in the particular unpublished letter at hand; writing to Lyell in 1860, for example, Darwin argued that "how far to lump & split species is indeed a hopeless problem. It must in the end, I think, be determined by mere convenience."⁷ It would be hard to locate a more succinct or more modern expression of Darwin's well-known disbelief in the existence of identifiable species.

Scholars interested in the social history of science, the growth of scientific ideas, the sociology of science, and the dynamics of scientific communities also will find much of interest in the letters, for they contain many of Darwin's views on these subjects, especially in reference to Darwin's assessment of the prospects for ultimate acceptance of his own theories. This is best exemplified in Darwin's confidences to friends in 1859 and 1860 regarding the fate of the Origin,⁸ but there are other examples concerning Darwin's views about priority and his estimation of the role his cirripede work would play in the growth of science.⁹

Still another revealing type of information expressed only in the letters is that relating to Darwin's assessments of his colleagues -- enlightening glimpses of Darwin's critical insight at work which rarely surfaced in the polite society of contemporary England but are now absolutely necessary for a full understanding of his professional identity and behavior. Where else can one find Darwin saying of Robert FitzRoy: "I never cease wondering at his character,... full of good... traits but spoiled by such an unlucky temper. Some part of... his brain wants mending....?"¹⁰. It is no wonder that this passage, as well as one which describes Richard Owen as "wonderfully clever in his malevolence,"¹¹ usually were deleted silently from the earlier published versions of Darwin's letters -- this is all the more reason for including them here.

To complement such insights and revelations, there is much autobiographical matter in the letters. It might be used to construct a reasonably good record both of Darwin's face-to-face encounters with his colleagues and of the content of such meetings.¹² Often the letters record Darwin's whereabouts, which information is especially useful in determining the dates of Darwin's frequent one-day trips into London -- something not systematically recorded elsewhere.¹³ Moreover, the letters constantly remind us that Darwin was as much a family man and a medical patient as he was a naturalist and a scientist, and they show how these different aspects of Darwin's life tended to interact. For example, in 1860, Darwin's daughter contracted remittent fever, and the family was forced by their concern for the young girl's life to remove to a healthier climate than that found at Down. While thus away, Darwin found himself unable to continue the research he had been conducting at home, so he filled his idle time by examining the sun-dew, an insectivorous plant common to the area being visited. This work eventually led to the publication of an entire book on insectivorous plants, and one could therefore argue the extreme externalist position that illness had been the cause for its appearance.¹⁴

Still another type of correspondence consists of purely business letters, which range from orders and acknowledgments of books and reprints -- data valuable to scholars -- to routine details such as the addition of a wing to Down House in 1876-1877 or the purchase of medical supplies.¹⁵ Such routine letters show, if nothing else, Darwin's meticulousness, and they are sometimes useful for dating other Darwin letters of greater import.

Need to Publish Letters

To a certain extent, scholars have been reaping benefits from Darwin's letters for long time, since the bulk of Darwin's most important letters have been in print for well over fifty years, and additional letters have been published from time to time ever since.¹⁶ One might well ask, then, why a calendar of 700 more letters is necessary, especially since portions, at least, of roughly half of the letters in the American Philosophical Society's collection have already been printed. Several different responses can be given to this question.

Most importantly, there is the problem of selection criteria in the major published collections of Darwin's correspondence. The three works which contain published versions of many of the items calendared below (as well as a great many other Darwin letters) provide only a selection of Darwin's correspondence, and those letters which are included are usually not transcribed in full. In all three of these works, the choice of both which letters are to be included and which portions of the chosen letters are to be printed has been colored by the motives of the editors. As these motives are not those of historians today, there are limitations -- some of them severe -- to the usefulness of these works as definitive references for modern scholars. To illustrate the point: "In choosing letters for publication," says Darwin's son Francis in the opening line of the preface of his edition of his father's Life and Letters, "I have been largely guided by the wish to illustrate my father's personal character." In some cases, such guidance led him to give a relatively low priority to the illustration of Darwin's scientific work, and in most cases, it meant deleting family matters as well as derogatory remarks and other embarrassing details.¹⁷ More Letters, edited by Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward, somewhat redresses the balance; its editors say that they prepared the volumes "to give as full an idea as possible of the course of Mr. Darwin's work," and they state further that their compendium contains "practically all the matter that it now seems desirable to publish. But," they continue, "at some future time others may find interesting data in what remains unprinted; this is certainly true of a short series of letters dealing with the Cirripedes, which are omitted solely for want of space."¹⁸ Similarly, in the preface to her two-volume biography of her mother, which contains 66 of her father's letters, Darwin's daughter, H. E. Litchfield, confesses that she began to prepare a record of her mother's life because she thought it would be "of value to her [Emma Darwin's] grandchildren," and then she altered and enlarged the scope of the book as she became interested in "the personalities of the writers" of the letters printed therein.¹⁹ While such criteria of inclusion and exclusion were perfectly respectable and common in their day, and scholars have profited greatly from all these works despite their limitations, there is still a need to treat Darwin's letters more systematically, particularly with the needs of historians of science and other scholars in mind.

A still more serious indictment of the principal sources of Darwin's correspondence is that those letters which do appear in them were not edited according to rigorous modern standards. "In printing the letters," Francis Darwin confesses about the Life and Letters, "I have followed (except in a few cases) the usual plan of indicating the existence of omissions or insertions." One wonders what the "few cases" were, and exactly how few they were. "I have not followed the originals," he continues, "as regards the spelling of names, the use of capital letters, or in the manner of punctuation."²⁰ Similarly, in More Letters, "dots indicate omissions, but many omissions are made without being so indicated."²¹ In Emma Darwin, "many omissions are made without putting any sign that this has been done. Neither the punctuation nor the spelling has been rigidly followed. But the sense has never wittingly been altered, although occasionally a word evidently omitted has been added without putting any sign that this has been done."²²

In addition to the problems relating to the imprecise editorial standards of these works and to standards of letter selection which stress Darwin's character to the neglect of his career and other aspects of his life, some scholars may have difficulty in using these words because: the letters are not placed in chronological order; in far too many cases are incorrectly dated or are not dated at all²³; and the indexes are inadequate.

To a certain extent, these final criticisms can also be levelled at some of the small selections of Darwin letters published as journal articles with increasing frequency since the centennial of the publication of the Origin in 1859.²⁴ Moreover, the quality of the transcriptions in some of these articles is not very good.²⁵ While this calendar will not rectify all of these problems (most notably because it contains a rather small and arbitrary selection of those letters published in these articles), it should clarify all such problems for the letters with which it deals. Moreover, use of this calendar should at least streamline the kind of research which can be conducted only while one is visiting the Society's archives. This should save much research time.²⁶

Nature of the Society's Darwin Collections

To a first approximation, Darwin's correspondents can be grouped according to their relationship to Darwin and their function as contributors to his work. A look at a few of these various types of correspondent may help readers to obtain a overview of the Darwin collections calendared here.

Among the correspondents, there are at least six types. 1. Members of the Darwin family. Letters to and from these persons are sometimes the most intimate of all of Darwin's letters, but they are not so numerous as letters to and from some correspondents in the other groups discussed below. This is probably because of Darwin's proximity to his family -- except, of course, during his early life, particularly during the voyage of the Beagle, when letters home to his sister are some of the most revealing letters Darwin ever wrote. 2. Confidants, friends, and close colleagues. These persons were the figures most closely associated with Darwin's everyday work, and the letters to them are the most useful for historians. In some cases, because of Darwin's removal from London and need to keep in close touch with his most trusted colleagues, the collected letters to these figures form an almost daily record of Darwin's life and work. 3. Other colleagues. These were scientists, naturalists, and the like with whom Darwin had only professional relations. Although somewhat less cordial than letters to confidants, correspondence with other colleagues is similar in substance to that with confidants. 4. Informants. These were rather special colleagues who supplied the sedentary Darwin with the observations and other data needed to test various aspects of his scientific theories. Darwin was careful in his selection of informants; he always checked to be certain that each one was an expert in the subject about which he was inquiring. Darwin had such informants in all corners of the world, but he also called upon nearby friends, relatives, former schoolmates, and acquaintances for information on topics about which such persons had some knowledge. 5. Business associates. This category includes booksellers, publishers, chemical suppliers, solicitors, architects, and the like. Correspondence with them is sometimes useful as a record of Darwin's activities, especially as an indicator of Darwin's reading, and it usually shows Darwin's attention to detail. 6. Unsolicited correspondents. From such persons Darwin received many letters, notes, and specimens. These ranged from crank mail to information on scientific curiosities about which Darwin showed great interest.

All six of these groups are represented to a greater or lesser degree in the American Philosophical Society's collections, and since some of the finest examples are not easily identified by perusal of the calendar, given its chronological format, they are discussed below. Unfortunately, they give a necessarily one-sided view of the relationship between Darwin and his correspondents, because there are only eleven letters to Darwin in the Society's collections.²⁷

At the core of the Library's holdings are the letters to Charles Lyell, the father of uniformitarian geology and Darwin's "Lord Chancellor" for science.²⁸ Until his death in 1875, Lyell was one of Darwin's closest confidants. Many of Darwin's letters to him have been published, although most of the passages concerning geology, as well as a few other crucial sentences here and there, have been excised from the printed versions. Some of the unpublished letters are also of importance.

The calendar lists an unusually rich correspondence with two other confidants: George John Romanes, the physiologist, and John Maurice Herbert, one of Darwin's schoolmates at Cambridge. Begun in 1874, the Darwin-Romanes correspondence warmed over time, as Darwin came to trust and admire this young colleague. In a sense, Romanes filled a gap for Darwin which was created with the death of Lyell in 1875, although in the Darwin-Romanes relationship the roles of elder and follower were reversed for Darwin from what they had been with Lyell. The letters to Romanes are replete with details about Darwin's pangenesis hypothesis and the experiments designed by the two men to test it, as well as much material on animal intelligence, spiritualism, and other topics. The letters to Herbert begin as early as 1828 and provide important insight into Darwin's early life, including his voyage on the Beagle. While some of these letters have been published, a few significant portions of them have not, and readers with a particular interest in the views of the young Darwin will probably want to study the Herbert entries in the calendar with extra care.²⁹

Informants are almost as well represented in the calendar as are confidants. The Library has a particularly good collection of letters to George Henry Kendrick Thwaites, the Ceylonese naturalist, concerning the flora and fauna of Ceylon and India as well as the expression of the emotions of savages in these regions. The collection illustrates well both the questions Darwin asked and the answers he expected to receive. The correspondence with Thomas Campbell Eyton, another of Darwin's schoolmates at Cambridge, is of similar interest, especially on topics relating to osteology and other morphological similarities, dispersal mechanisms, and domestic varieties. Both the Thwaites and the Eyton letters are indicative of the methods of gathering data used extensively by Darwin during and after the Origin period (ca. 1854-1875); the earlier part of these years, of course, represent Darwin's most important fact-gathering episode since his return from the Beagle voyage.

The collections of letters to the correspondents named above by no means comprise all of the Library's Darwin holdings, of course. There are a great many other letters, sometimes in groups to a single correspondent (e.g. to Philip Lutley Sclater or to John Phillips) and sometimes scattered through miscellaneous correspondence. Only careful reading of all the letters in a given period will give scholars a genuine feel for the totality of Darwin's life and work.

Choosing the Calendar Format

In choosing the calendar format for this guide, the primary objective has been to bring scholar and documents as close together as possible, given the restraints of economy, of time, and of the unique character of the originals. Almost thirty years ago, the usefulness of a calendar for achieving this objective in situations such as exist with the Darwin letters at the Society was summed up well by archivist and local historian Morris L. Radoff of the Maryland Hall of Records:

The material in the Darwin collections in the Library fits all three of these desiderata. First, it is indeed rather disarranged, owing primarily to the piecemeal method of acquisition of most of it. Second, because Darwin usually failed to date his letters completely and sometimes failed to date them at all, chronological arrangement demanded more time for preliminary study than would normally be available to the average scholar interested in only a portion of the Society's Darwin holdings and unable to afford either a lengthy stay in the Philadelphia area or photostatic copies of considerable amounts of Darwin materials. Third, since about half of the letters are dispersed throughout the archives as separate collections of letters from Darwin to a single correspondent, scholars interested in an overview of Darwin's correspondence would have had to conduct a multitude of separate searches in the absence of a single master calendar.

This calendar is somewhat more extensive than most. A description of this more extensive type of reference work and a justification for its employment in this instance are summed up well in the Harvard Guide to American History:

Because of its extensive nature, the calendar should serve the needs of most scholars. In those cases in which it is not sufficient, however, the original manuscript letters are still on deposit at the Library, and photocopies and/or microfilms of the originals are available for a small fee on a special order basis. In addition, after a brief period of a few years during which they will be used for another project, a set of complete and annotated transcripts of the letters (i.e. transcripts prepared by the editor to facilitate the compilation of this calendar) will be available for study.

Resolving the Dating Problem

Anyone who has worked with Darwin's letters knows how difficult it often is to assign a correct and exact date to each of his letters. Francis Darwin and A. C. Seward stated the problem well when they wrote that "Mr. Darwin, who was careful in other things, generally omitted the date in familiar correspondence, and it is often only by treating a letter as a detective studies a crime that we can make sure of its date."³² For a compiler of a calender of Darwin's letters, of course, the inconsistent dating creates the same problems and puzzles that Francis Darwin faced, and, like him, one has to employ a variety of methods of dating that would do honor to Sherlock Holmes. The usual techniques involving watermarks, postmarks, content analysis, and handwriting analysis were sufficient in most cases, but even after such methods had been employed the dates on a number of letters remained ambiguous.

Fortunately, study of the variant addresses appearing in the headings of almost all Darwin letters written since 1842 has allowed the dating of most of the letters in the calendar, at least to within a few years.³³ The research on this subject, conducted in collaboration with Thaddeus J. Trenn, University of Regensburg, indicates that Darwin used at least nine variant letterhead addresses for his home in Down as tabulated in the table below and illustrated in Figure 2.

Address variants



Type	Address Variant	Dates Used
Type 1:	Down near Bromley Kent (written)	1842 to 1845
Type 2:	Down Bromley Kent (written)	1843 to 1846 and 1855 to 1861
Type 3:	Down Farnborough Kent (written)	1846 to 1855
Type 4:	Down. Bromley. Kent. S.E. (printed)	1861 to 1869
Type 5:	Down. Beckenham Kent. S.E. (printed, with Bromley crossed out and Beckenham added in writing)	1869 to 1871
Type 6:	Down, Beckenham, Kent. (printed)	1871 to 1875
Type 7:	Down Beckenham Kent (written)	1874 (briefly)
Type 8:	DOWN, BECKENHAM, KENT RAILWAY STATION ORPINGTON. S.E.R. (printed)	1874 to 1881
Type 9:	DOWN, BECKENHAM, KENT (RAILWAY STATION ORPINGTON. S.E.R.) (printed, with parentheses added in writing)	1878 to 1882

(The end points for these dates were determined by recording the addresses and the dates for all unambiguously-dated Darwin letters which could be found, both here and at Cambridge University Library -- probably about 1,000 letters in all. A plausible explanation apparently can be advanced for every change of address, and in most cases, the switch from one address type to another is sudden. For the purposes of dating the letters in this calendar, however, the greatest possible latitude in the beginning and final dates of use of each variant has been assumed; this has produced the overlaps in the time periods given above. The research on the variant addresses continues, and the final results will probably be published elsewhere.)

One final note about dates is necessary. Often the date assigned to a particular letter in this calendar will differ by a few days from the date given in a published version of the same letter, especially those published versions appearing in Life and Letters or More Letters. This is because the editors of these works often used the date of receipt of a letter, taken from the endorsement, rather than the actual date on which the letter was written.³⁴ In cases in which Darwin gave some reference to the day of the week on which the letter was written, it has been possible to determine the date of writing by reference to a perpetual calendar. In such cases, the correction of the date has been made silently.

P.T.C.

The Darwin Papers are organized into two primary groups, the first listed in Thomas Carroll's Calendar, the latter not.


B D25	Charles Darwin Papers, 1828-1882	2.0 linear feet
B D25m	Getz Collection, 1799-1874 (not inventoried here)	0.5 linear feet

None.

Acquired, 1950s to present.

Cite as: Charles Darwin Papers, American Philosophical Society.

The Annotated Calendar of the Letters of Charles Darwin in the Library of the American Philosophical Society was edited and annotated by P. Thomas Carroll, with a foreword by Frederick Burkhart.

The print edition was published by SR Scholarly Resources Inc. in 1976.

Address: Scholarly Resources, Inc. 1508 Pennsylvania Avenue Wilmington, Delaware 19806

Many of these letters are described briefly in P. Thomas Carroll, An Annotated Calendar of the Letters of Charles Darwin in the Library of the American Philosophical Society (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1976). Call no.: 012 D25c.

A comprehensive calendar of Darwin manuscripts is provided in Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith, A Calendar of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin, 1821-1882 (N.Y.: Garland, 1985). Call no.: 016.091 D25b

Although Darwin's correspondence is very widely dispersed, the largest collection of Darwin Papers is housed at the Cambridge University Library (http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/MSS/Darwin.html). Cambridge hosts an on-line calendar of Darwin correspondence at http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Departments/Darwin/calintro.html.

The Getz Collection (B D25.m) contains additional Darwin Papers, and the Library houses the complete files of the Darwin Papers Editorial Project (Ms. Coll. 28) (including photocopies of all extant Darwin letters) and microfilm of Darwin materials held at Down House (films 496,13; 496,14), along with material relating to Erasmus Darwin and other members of the Darwin family.

In addition to manuscript letters to and from Charles Darwin, several other items in the Library of the American Philosophical Society may be of interest to the Darwin scholar. These are discussed below in more-or-less general way which, although not a comprehensive list, should give readers some idea of the nature of these collections. The items are discussed in groups, by type of document.

Manuscript items

Included under this rubric are three types of documents:

the correspondence and other papers of those people who corresponded with Darwin--all of it relating directly to manuscript letters calendared above;
autograph documents from Darwin's own papers or from others, but relating directly to Darwin and not connected to any of the manuscript letters calendared above; and
manuscript correspondence to and from other members of the Darwin family besides Charles Darwin.

There are seven items of the first type. All of these pertain to the case of the inheritance of an injury in a goose, as related to Darwin by Reuben A. Blair in the correspondence with him calendared above. The documents are: 1) a photograph of the deformed goose; 2) a letter from Blair concerning the goose and printed in the Sedalia Democrat; 3) a letter from William Henry Flower to Blair; 4) the report by Flower and his assistant, Dr. Larson, on the wings of the affected geese; 5) a letter from Blair to an unnamed correspondent; and 6) letters exchanged between Blair and Spencer Fullerton Baird of the Smithsonian Institution.

There are twenty items of the second type. These documents are: 1) five leaves from the manuscript of the Origin of Species; 2) a signed page from the manuscript of the Descent of Man; 3) a signed page from some other Darwin manuscript (discusses Catasetum); 4) a printed petition for the endowment of research, issued by J. Norman Lockyer and C. E. Appleton, and signed by Darwin; 5) the final page of the petition for a pension for Alfred Russel Wallace, signed by twelve persons, including Darwin; 6) sketches of Darwin, his wife, grandson, and dog, by Albert Goodwin; 7) documents pertaining to Darwin's funeral in Westminster Abbey (eleven items); 8) inscription from the Carroll # 372 statue of Darwin at Oxford University; 9) a discussion of Darwin's B: D25.176 religion by H. Buxton Forman; and 10) a pass to the Zoological Gardens, issued to James Gough by Darwin.

There are 44 items of the third type, which is too many to list individually here. Members of the Darwin family involved in this correspondence are: Emma Wedgwood Darwin (two letters, correspondence with Mrs. Georgiana Rosetta Smyth Flower and with John Maurice Herbert); Francis Darwin (39 letters, correspondence with Leo Abram Errera, George John Romanes, Thomas Roscoe Rede Stebbing, and Otto Zacharias); and George Howard Darwin (three letters, correspondence with F. W. Surman and Otto Zacharias).

Photocopies of manuscript items

The Library has 26 documents pertaining to Darwin, the originals of which are located elsewhere; only photographically-reproduced paper copies of the documents are at the APS. These fall into two categories: photocopies of manuscript correspondence with Darwin; and photocopies of Darwin-related documents from the papers of Darwin correspondents. In the first category, there are copies of correspondence with the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (one letter), Ignatius Donnelly (two letters), Hugo de Vries (one letter), Benjamin Dann Walsh (eighteen letters), and Jeffries Wyman (two letters). In the second category, there is a photocopy of a letter from Frank J. Mead, editor of the Minneapolis Evening Times, to Ignatius Donnelly, concerning Darwinism and Christianity, and a photocopy of a portion of Donnelly's diary which mentions Darwin.

Microfilms of manuscript items

The Library has nine sets of microfilms of Darwin materials which are on deposit at various institutions all over the world. These films contain the following: 1) correspondence in possession of Down House, Kent (one reel); 2) correspondence in the Robert Stecher Collection at the Cleveland Medical Library Association (one reel); 3) correspondence in the New York Botanical Garden (one reel); letters to Auguste H. Forel, from originals in the Medicinhistorisches Institut, University of Switzerland, and in University of Basel Library (sixteen frames); 4) letters to Bernhard Studer and to A. von Morlot (seven items); 5) letters to J. Moulinie, A. Dohrn, Karl Christoph Vogt, Pictet, and de la Rive, from originals in the Bibliotheque Publique et Universitaire de Geneve (25 letters); 6) notebooks written during the voyage of the Beagle, from Down House, Kent (eighteen notebooks, one reel); 7) diary and correspondence written during the voyage of the Beagle, from Down House, Kent (one reel); and 9) chronology and bibliography of Darwin's life, compiled by Sir Gavin de Beer, containing an incomplete list of all of Darwin's correspondence (two reels).

Photographs and prints

The Library has approximately twelve different photographs and prints of Darwin and of Down House. Some of the best of these are used as illustrations in this calendar.

Books

There are about 150 copies of various editions of Darwin's works in the Library, plus a fair collection of some of the rarer and/or more significant editions of the works of his correspondents, colleagues, and contemporary naturalists and biologists. Space does not permit a full listing of the 150 works by Darwin in the Library, but it is possible to give some indication of the collection by referring to the number assigned to each edition held by the Library in the standard bibliography of Darwin's works (R. B. Freeman, The Works of Charles Darwin: An Annotated Bibliographical Handlist [London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1965]). The "Freeman numbers" of the Library's holdings are given below, without comment.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 16, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 95, 99, 103, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 142, 205, 207, 208, 210, 219, 220, 231, 231n, 232, 234, 246, 247, 250, 255, 269, 281, 283, 292, 297, 298, 303, 305, 308, 309, 311, 314, 315, 319, 332, 333, 334, 343, 344, 345, 346, 349, 359, 361, 362, 364, 365, 366, 367, 369, 370, 371, 173, 374, 375, 376, 377, 378, 380, 381, 383, 396, 405, 406, 407, 409, 411, 416, 425, 426, 432, 445, 447, 452, 454, 458, 461, 464, 468, 471, 473, 476, 477, 492, 503, 507, 508, 512, 513, 517, 530, 541.

In addition to these editions, the Library has at least 26 editions of Darwin's works not listed in Freeman.

Subject card catalogs

For a great many years, the Library has maintained subject card catalogs on Darwinism. These catalogs list any published work among the Library's holdings which mentions or discusses Darwin and/or Darwinism. They provide an unparalleled source for study of the influence of Darwin upon society and upon Western thought. There is one card catalog for books, containing approximately 2,800 entries, and another for journal articles, containing approximately 1,000 entries.

An effort has been made to make this appendix as complete as possible, but as the Library is constantly adding to its Darwin holdings, the careful scholar is warned that this compendium will be out of date in a short time.

Other Darwin Letters in the Greater Philadelphia Area

It is expected that this calendar will render unnecessary many visits to Philadelphia by Darwin scholars which would have been mandatory otherwise. While this is a beneficial result of the publication of this book, it is not without its harmful side effects. The worst of these would have been that the many miscellaneous Darwin materials in other institutions in the Philadelphia area might be neglected; this appendix is designed to prevent this by listing the results of a search by mail for other manuscript Darwin letters in select institutions in the greater Philadelphia area.

To conduct the search, a form letter was sent to the 31 institutions in the area judged by the editor to be the most likely to possess Darwin letters. Thirty institutions replied; they are listed below, and the name of the person responding is given for each institution.

Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (Martha T. Pilling, Library Assistant)
Bryn Mawr College Library (James Tanis, Head Librarian)
Bucknell University (George M. Jenks, Librarian, Ellen Clarke Bertrand Library)
College of Physicians of Philadelphia (Ellen G. Gartrell, Assistant Curator, Historical)
Dickenson College (Danna Spitzform, Assistant to the Curator, Special Collections, Boyd Lee Spahr Library)
Drexel University (Michael Halperin, Archives and Special Collection)
Eleutherian Mills Historical Library (Betty-Bright P. Low, Research and Reference Librarian)
Franklin and Marshall College (Frances L. Hopkins, Reference Librarian, Fackenthal Library)
The Franklin Institute (Stephanie A. Morris, Associate Archivist)
Free Library of Philadelphia (Howell J. Heaney, Rare Book Librarian)
Hahnemann Medical College Library (Barbara Williams, Acting Librarian)
Haverford College Library (Edwin B. Bronner, Librarian)
Historical Society of Delaware (Gladys M. Coghlan)
Jefferson Medical College Library (Robert T. Lentz, Librarian)
Lafayette College (Ronald E. Robbins, Reference Librarian, David Bishop Skillman Library)
Lehigh University (James D. Mack, Director of University Libraries, Linderman Library)
Library Company of Philadelphia (Edwin Wolf, II, Librarian)
Pennsylvania State University (Dorrie Evans, Rare Books and Special Collections, Fred Lewis Pattee Library)
Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science Library (Elizabeth W. J. Chase, Librarian)
Princeton University Library (Mardel Pacheco, Assistant to Curator of Manuscripts)
Philip H. and A. S. W. Rosenbach Foundation Museum and Library (Clive E. Driver, Director)
Saint Joseph's College (Josephine Savaro, Head Librarian, Drexel Library)
Swarthmore College (Judith Pullam, Administrative Assistant, Thomas E. and Jeanette L. McCabe Library)
Temple University (Thomas M. Whitehead, Head, Special Collections Department, Samuel Paley Library)
University of Delaware Libraries (Stuart Dick, Special Collections, Hugh M. Morris Library)
University of Pennsylvania Libraries (Neda Westlake, Rare Book Collection)
Ursinus College (Calvin D. Yost, Jr., Librarian, Myrin Library)
Villanova University (Mary A. Dorrian, Readers Service, Falvey Memorial Library)
Wagner Free Institute of Science (Robert Chambers, Director)
and Widener College (Lee C. Brown, Librarian, Wolfgram Memorial Library)

The editor is grateful for the cooperation of these institutions and individuals.

Twenty-four letters of Charles Darwin were produced by the search. They are listed below, in chronological order.

1838 January 23 Sunday, to John Stevens Henslow; Al, S by init.; 4p.; courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
1843 July 19th, to Ernest Dieffenbach; ALS; 2p.; courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
1853 Jan. 10th, to Albany Hancock; ALS; 4p.; courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
?1854 Nov. 20th, to John Stevens Henslow; ALS; 2p.; courtesy of the Princeton University Library.
1860 March. 4th, to Joseph Leidy; ALS; 4p.; courtesy of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (see their Collection 1). See calendar entry for this letter (number 202), page 69, above.
1860 May 8., to the Secretary of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia; ALS; 1p.; courtesy of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (see their Collection 330).
1862 April 25th, to Heinrich Georg Bronn; ALS; 6p.; courtesy of Lehigh University.
1871 July 1, to?; ALS; 1p.; courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
1872 Oct. 10th, to Alpheus Hyatt; ALS; 4p.; courtesy of the Princeton University Library (see the Hyatt and Mayer Correspondence).
1873 Feb 19, to William M. Canby; LS; 3p.; William M. Canby Correspondence, Society of Natural History of Delaware Archives, on deposit at the Historical Society of Delaware.
1873 May 7, to William M. Canby; LS; 2p.; William M. Canby Correspondence, Society of Natural History of Delaware Archives, on deposit at the Historical Society of Delaware.
1874 May 11, to Thomas Lauder Brunton; LS; 4p.; courtesy of the Princeton University Library.
1874 June 30., to?; LS; 2p.; courtesy of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
1875 Oct. 30th, to Messrs. Smith & Elder; ALS; 1p.; courtesy of Lehigh University.
1876 Aug. 21st, to Messrs. Smith & Elder; ALS; 1p.; courtesy of Lehigh University.
1876 Nov. 20th, to?; LS; 2p.; original in private possession of Dr. Seymour Adelman, c/o James Tanis, Head Librarian, Bryn Mawr College Library.
1877 March 7., to Messrs. Smith & Elder; LS; 4p.; courtesy of Lehigh University.
1877 June 6th, to?; ALS; 1p.; courtesy of Haverford College Library (Charles Roberts Autograph Letters Collection).
1880 Nov. 5, to?; ALS; 1p.; courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
1882 Feb 22, to?; LS; 4p.; courtesy of Princeton University Library (privately owned; from the private library of William H. Scheide, Princeton, New Jersey; no connection with Princeton University Library).
n.y. April 6th., to?; ALS; 3p.; courtesy of Lehigh University.
n.y. May 7, to?; ALS; 1p.; courtesy of Philip Schwartz, M.D., Medical Research Director, Warren State Hospital, Warren, Pennsylvania (privately owned by Dr. Schwartz).
n.y. Oct 2d., to?; ALS; 1p.; courtesy of Lehigh University.
n.y. Oct 14th, to "Madam"; ALS; 2p.; courtesy of Lehigh University.

All letters are listed with the permission of their owners, for which permission the editor is grateful.

Burkhardt, Frederick, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1985-). Currently 12 vols. See The Darwin Correspondence Project (http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Departments/Darwin/pubns.html).

¹ This is no place for a systematic review of the literature, but here are some examples: on the origins of Darwin's ideas, see recent articles by Barbara G. Beddall, Sandra Herbert, and Joel S. Schwartz in the Journal of the History of Biology, and Camille Limoges, La sélection naturelle: C tude sur la premiére constitution d'un concept (1837-1859) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970); on Darwin's method, see Michael T. Ghiselin, The Triumph of the Darwinian Method (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969), and Stephen Jay Gould, "Darwin's `Big Book'," Science, N.Y., 188 (1975): 824-26; on the dissemination and early reception of Darwin's ideas, see Thomas F. Glick, ed., The Comparative Reception of Darwinism (Austin, Texas: Univ. of Texas Press, 1974), and David L. Hull, Darwin and His Critics: The Reception of Darwin's Theory of Evolution by the Scientific Community (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973); on the ultimate acceptance of Darwinism, see William B. Provine, The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971); on the enlightenment of modern scientists, besides the numerous examples in population genetics, see Paul Ekman, ed., Darwin and Facial Expression: A Century of Research in Review (New York: Academic Press, 1973).

² Some recent published transcriptions of Darwin's manuscripts include, in chronological order of publication: Barlow, ed., Autobiography; Darwin and Henslow; Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, Together with Darwin's Early and Unpublished Notebooks, transcribed and annotated by Paul H. Barrett (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1974); and Stauffer, ed., CD's Nat. Selection. This list is hardly exhaustive. See note 16 for recent printings of Darwin's letters.

³ Thomas Jefferson to Robert Walsh, April 5, 1823, as quoted in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd, et. al. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1950-), I, xi.

⁴ Nora Barlow, ed., Autobiography.

⁵ Darwin to Lyell, Sept. 12, [1860], APS; see below, p. 85. (This and other examples of Darwin's letters used in the introduction are selected from unpublished portions of letters now in the American Philosophical Society; they illustrate the wealth of material edited out of previously published versions of Darwin's letters.) The passage on Ammonites which is being corrected is in Darwin, Origin (1859 or 1860), 321-22; according to Peckham, Variorum Origin, 531-32, lines 78-83, Darwin never brought his published claim regarding Ammonites into agreement with the admissions made to Lyell in this letter.

⁶ For example, in a letter to Lyell dated November 18, 1849, and printed in More Letters, II, 130-31, letter 486, Darwin wrote that "without most distinct evidence I will never admit that a dike joins on rectangularly to a stream of lava." Sixteen days later, in a letter dated December 4, he retreated somewhat from this position: "I remember in my last letter talking very big about dikes never being connected directly (i.e. rectangularly) with lava-streams; but it is clear that such occur frequently at the Sandwich Is[lan]ds without any cones." Although he continues by claiming that the situation at the Sandwich Islands [i.e. Hawaii] is "a rare exceptional case", Darwin clearly is amending his earlier claim. The December 4 letter has not been published before. See below, pp. 32-34.

⁷ Darwin to Lyell, December 4, [1860], APS, see below, pp. 89-90.

⁸ Just after the Origin was published, during the period when reviews of the book began to appear, Darwin told Asa Gray, "I have made up my mind to be well abused; but I think it of importance that my notions sh[oul]d be read by intelligent men, accustomed to scientific argument though not naturalists. It may seem absurd, but I think such men will drag after them those naturalists, who have too firmly fixed in their heads that a species is an entity." (Darwin to Asa Gray, December 21, [1859], Gray Herbarium, Harvard University; printed in Life and Letters II, 244-45; text above from manuscript letter.) In this passage, Darwin implied that his evolutionary "notions" were revolutionary in nature, at least among naturalists, and that he expected his supporters to come from outside the community of naturalists. How important a role he foresaw for these supporters is revealed four months later in his remark to Lyell that "the non-comittal [sic] men do not always most help a science." (Darwin to Lyell, April 27/28, [1860], APS, see below, p. 76.) Darwin reiterates this view and identifies some of his supporters in May when he writes to Lyell: "I can very plainly see, as I lately told [Joseph Dalton] Hooker, that my Book would have been & [would] be a mere flash in the pan, were it not for you, Hooker & a few others." (Darwin to Lyell, May 18, [1860], APS, see below, p. 78.) A month later-ironically on the eve of the historic Oxford meeting of the B.A.A.S. at which the Origin was debated so hotly-Darwin despaired of the rapid conversion of naturalists through the intercession of supporters, arguing instead that "time alone will bring naturalists round, when they find that they can explain many facts on such views as mine, & cannot on view of creation." (Darwin to Lyell, [June] 25, [1860], APS, see below, p. 82.) It is almost as if Darwin's practice of population thinking, so well-used on plant and animal species, was being applied to scientific communities; social historians and sociologists of science may find this of some interest, as might some philosophers of science. The foregoing is not meant, of course, to delineate the recent historiography of the social side of Darwin studies; for a stimulating marxist treatment of some aspects of this, see Robert Young, "The Historiographic and Ideological Contexts of the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Man's Place in Nature," in MikulC![scaron] Teich and Robert Young, eds., Changing Perspectives in the History of Science: Essays in Honour of Joseph Needham (London: Heinemann, 1973), 344-438, esp. 361-88.

⁹ In a confidence to Lyell in 1860, Darwin revealed his views on the role of priority in science, exposing in the process why he apparently never felt completely comfortable publishing simultaneously with Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858. Regarding a reference to Darwin by Asa Gray in one of the later's works, Darwin wrote: "he put my name before [that of Edward] Forbes on Glacial distribution: & I told him in answer that I had written out the notion 3 or 4 years before Forbes, but that I had no sort of claim to notice on this head, as he published first, & that in the Origin I shd. of course take no notice of this." (Darwin to Lyell, [February] 12, [1860], APS, see below, p. 71.) This gives some indication of Darwin's scrupulous professional ethics. On cirripedes, Darwin's expectations regarding the support he would receive for his radical discoveries were far more limited than were his expectations for his work on the origin of species. When Albany Hancock informed Darwin that he believed in Darwin's discovery of complemental males, Darwin replied that he had "greatly feared tha no one would believe in them; and now I know that [Richard] Owen, [James Dwight] Dana, and yourself are believers, I am most heartily content." (Darwin to Hancock, January 10, [1853], as printed in John Hancock, [ed.], "Letters from C. Darwin, Esq., to A. Hancock, Esq.," Nat. Hist. Trans. Northumb., 8, pt. 2 [1886]: 250-78, at 269; original at Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.)

¹⁰ Darwin to Lyell, August 9, [1838], APS, see below, p. 4. Although Darwin probably was not anticipating it here, FitzRoy committed suicide in 1865.

¹¹ Darwin to Lyell, July 30, [1860], APS, see below, p. 83.)

¹² In 1860, for example, he wrote Lyell: "I have nothing to say, as I have seen no one (except indeed [Joseph Dalton] Hooker for an hour or two at Kew) for an age." (Darwin to Lyell, July 30, [1860], APS, see below, p. 83.) This letter implies that the content of Darwin's meetings with colleagues forms much of the meat of his letters. Still, Darwin exaggerates in his claim that, when he has seen no one, he has nothing to say.

¹³ For example, we can tell from the letters that Darwin met Lyell in London on February 6, 1845. (Darwin to Lyell, Saturday, [February 8, 1845], APS, see below, pp. 16-17.) Unfortunately, this type of information is sometimes incorrect, either because Darwin would announce a date for a trip to London and then be too ill to travel on the appointed day, which occurred regularly, or because Darwin got his dates mixed up, which occurred very occasionally.

¹⁴ On his daughter's illness, see letters to Lyell during summer of 1860 (Darwin to Lyell, May 18, [1860], et seq., APS; see below, p. 78 ff). See especially: Darwin to Lyell, July 30, [1860], APS, see below, p. 83; and ibid., August 11, [1860], APS, see below, pp. 83-84. The first chapter of Darwin's book on insectivorous plants begins: "During the summer of 1860, I was surprised by finding how large a number of insects were caught by the leaves of the common sun-dew (Drosera rotundifolia) on a heath in Sussex. I had heard that insects were thus caught, but knew nothing further on the subject." (Darwin, Insectivorous Plants [1875], 1.)

¹⁵ On the addition to Down House, see: Darwin to [William] Marshall, September 19, 1876, APS, see below, p. 173, ibid., September 29, [1876], APS, see below, pp. 173-74; and ibid., November 22, [1876], APS, see below, p. 174. On the purchase of an enema, see Darwin to?, November 8, [1871-1875], APS, see below, p. 149.

¹⁶ A great many Darwin letters appear in the three volumes of Life and Letters the two volumes of More Letters, and the two volumes of Emma Darwin. A few of the many locations in which Darwin correspondence has appeared recently are, in chronological order: Gavin de Beer, "Further Unpublished Letters of Charles Darwin," Ann. Sci., 14 (1958): 83-115; idem, ed., "Some Unpublished Letters of Charles Darwin," Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond., 14 (1959); 12-66; Robert M. Stecher, "The Darwin-Innes Letters: The Correspondence of an Evolutionist with His Vicar, 1848-1884," Ann. Sci., 17 (1961): 201-58; Darwin and Henslow; Gavin de Beer, ed., "The Darwin Letters at Shrewsbury School," Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond., 23 (1968): 68-85; Robert M. Stecher, "The Darwin-Bates Letters: Correspondence between Two Nineteenth-Century Travellers and Naturalists," Ann. Sci., 25 (1969): 1-47, 95-125; Paul H. Barrett and Alain F. Corcos, "A Letter from Alexander Humboldt to Charles Darwin," J. Hist. Med., 27 (1972): 159-72; Barbara G. Beddall, " `Notes for Mr. Darwin': Letters to Charles Darwin from Edward Blyth at Calcutta: A Study in the Process of Discovery," Journal of the History of Biology, 6 (1973): 69-95; Thaddeus J. Trenn, "Charles Darwin, Fossil Cirripedes, and Robert Fitch: Presenting Sixteen Hitherto Unpublished Darwin Letters of 1849 to 1851," Proc. Am. phil. Soc., 118 (1974): 471-91; and Lewis S. Feuer, "Is the `Darwin-Marx Correspondence' Authentic?" Ann. Sci., 32 (1975): 1-12. For a reasonably complete, but by no means exhaustive, bibliography of Darwin letters published somewhat earlier, see Gavin de Beer, ed., "Some Unpublished Letters of Charles Darwin," op. cit., this note, 60-62 and 66.

¹⁷ Life and Letters I, iii.

¹⁸ More Letters, I, viii.

¹⁹ Emma Darwin, I, vii. The count of 66 letters is from the privately printed edition, published in 1904; other editions are probably slightly different.

²⁰ Life and Letters I, iv.

²¹ More Letters, I, ix.

²² Emma Darwin, I, ix. Italics added.

²³ See, for example, the statement of the method of dating used by Francis Darwin and Seward (More Letters, I, x). For an example of an improperly dated letter, see Darwin to Asa Gray, April 4, [1858]; this letter is dated "1859" in the first edition of Life and Letters ([1887], II, 154-55), but it is deleted from later editions, probably because Francis Darwin realized that it was improperly dated.

²⁴ See note 16, above.

²⁵ The usual reason for a poor transcription is the inability of the transcriber to read Darwin's handwriting, but still another reason is that thorough editorial standards are usually not employed for the transcription of the small number of letters usually included in these articles. A simple but important example is the use of parentheses instead of brackets around the editorially-added word "Cryptophialus" in the printed text of a letter to Albany Hancock, December 25, [1849], as printed in John Hancock, [ed.], "Letters from C. Darwin, Esq., to A. Hancock, Esq.," Nat. Hist. Trans. Northumb., 8 (1886): 250-78, at p. 258; original at APS, see below, p. 34. The unsuspecting scholar without access to the original letter might conclude from the printed text that by 1849 Darwin had identified his Arthrobalanus specimen as a Cryptophialus; this Darwin had not done-and in fact probably did not do until 1853-and realization of this is central to an understanding of Darwin's cirripede work (Thaddeus J. Trenn, "Charles Darwin, Fossil Cirripedes, and Robert Fitch: Presenting Sixteen Hitherto Unpublished Darwin Letters of 1849 to 1851," op. cit., note 16, passim, esp. 472-73 and 472n.

²⁶ In some cases, a trip to Philadelphia might be avoided entirely by the acquisition of photocopies of letters of interest by mail-a practice which the Society wishes to encourage.

²⁷ This unfortunate circumstance results from Darwin's habit of destroying letters received; this practice was not discontinued until 1862, and even after that date Darwin did not save all of his letters. Apparently he did not think of letters in the way Jefferson did when he wrote the passage quoted earlier. (Life and Letters I, v.)

²⁸ Darwin meant that he respected Lyell's scientific and professional judgment above that of all others. See Life and Letters II, 119.

²⁹ See particularly Darwin to Herbert, June 2, 1833, APS, see below, p. 2. The passage in this letter which discusses carnations and peaches shows Darwin's exposure to such subjects at an early age, and indicates that Darwin probably also discussed such topics while at Cambridge.

³⁰ "A Guide to Practical Calendaring," American Archivist, 11 (1948): 123-40, at 127.

³¹ Frank Freidel, ed., Harvard Guide to American History, rev. ed., 2v. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1974), I, 23.

³² More Letters, I, x.

³³ To the best of the editor's knowledge, this regularity in the Darwin addresses was first discussed and employed for dating purposes by Gavin de Beer; see de Beer, "Some Unpublished Letters of Charles Darwin," op. cit., note 16, 13-14. As de Beer points out, many of the printed versions of the letters give the simple address of "Down", thereby obscuring the variant headings.

³⁴ The editors state this explicitly in More Letters, I, x.

³⁵ The For the sake of argument, traditional forms are enumerated in: Morris L. Radoff, "A Guide to Practical Calendaring," op. cit., note 30; and idem, "A Practical Guide to Calendaring," American Archivist, 11 (1948): 203-22.

Some might also object to the method of production (i.e. photo offset of a carefully-proofed typescript, rather than typeset), but this was necessary to keep the cost per copy down to a level reasonable enough so that scholars could afford personal copies of the calendar.

³⁶ Although it is somewhat out of fashion to give the dimensions -- the argument against inclusion being that, given the disparities of different types of handwriting, size is a poor indicator of length of text -- measurements are given in this calendar because of two special factors: 1) most of the letters in the calendar are in Darwin's hand, so there is an uncommonly good relationship between dimensions and length of text; and 2) the dimensions of Darwin's stationery in some cases can be used to corroborate a determination of a date for an undated letter. For example, a claim that an undated letter on stationery measuring eight by five inches was written in, say, 1860, will be corroborated if other Darwin letters known to have been written around this same date also are written on stationery of the same size. This is by no means a hard and fast rule, however; Darwin apparently reverted to leftover scraps and remainders of old stationery on occasion.

³⁷ Radoff, "A Guide to Practical Calendaring," op. cit., note 30, 134.

³⁸ An example of an editorial addition is the "(forwarded to)" in the address for Herbert in Darwin to Herbert, June, 1832, pp. 1-2 below. An example of a dubious reading is the "(S?)" in the address for Herbert in Darwin to Herbert, [September 13, 1828], p. 1 below. An example of material appearing in parentheses in the original is Lyell's "(105)" in his endorsement of Darwin to Lyell, [December (?19), 1837], p. 4 below.

³⁹ Such marks by Francis Darwin are usually readily distinguishable because they often are written in a distinctive purple ink. Francis Darwin refers to these marks himself in a letter to Léo Abram Errera when he says: "Please excuse the numbers of reference with which I have marked the letters [from Charles Darwin to Errera, which Errera lent to Francis for use in the Life and Letters]." (F. Darwin to Errera, [October 25, 1882]. APS; see appendix below.)

⁴⁰ In addition, despite the many errors and other indications of hurriedness in Darwin's letters, the many corrections in the letters indicate that the meticulous Darwin paid reasonably close attention to details of spelling, grammar, punctuation, and the like. A good illustration of this trait appears in a letter to Lyell in which Darwin tells the geologist that he had misspelled "Van Diemen's Land [i.e. Tasmania]" in a manuscript (Darwin to Lyell, [August 2, 1845], APS, calendar listing below, pp. 17-18; this part of the letter is not brought out in the calendar entry.)

⁴¹ Radoff, "A Guide to Practical Calendaring," op. cit., note 30, 136-40

Purists might not find this calender to their liking. It deviates from traditional practices³⁵ in a number of details, from the distinctive overall format of each of its entries to an unusually liberal use of brackets and inverted commas. These innovations have been dictated by the uncommonly uniform nature of the items analyzed (almost all of them letters written by Darwin), by the peculiar characteristics of Darwin's letters, and by the unique needs of Darwin scholars. In the case of each uncommon procedure, a conscious determination was made that the benefits to be derived by departure from standard practice outweigh the perils and bother incumbent upon readers who must first school themselves in so many unorthodoxies.

Rules followed and usages observed are explained below, in five sections: format of entries -- an extended guide to most of the practices followed; editorial conventions (i.e. treatment of orthography, punctuation, obsolete grammar, and the like in quoted passages); textual devices; descriptive abbreviations of items (e.g. ALS); and printing conventions. The first section, on format, explains what material is discussed in the four sections that follow it. Illustrations of sample manuscript letters are provided (Figs. 3 and 4), so that users may see for themselves how various situations were treated editorially.

The calendar consists of a series of entries numbered consecutively in the left-hand margin. Except where noted, each entry represents one letter or other manuscript item, plus all accompanying enclosures, sketches, and the like. Unless indicated otherwise, all enclosures are in Darwin's hand, unsigned, and on approximately the same size and type of paper as the letters with which they are enclosed. Each entry consists of four parts: date; description of item(s); abstract, including publication information, if any; and annotations, if any. Each section is separated from the others by a blank line; otherwise, the entries are single space.

Arrangement of the parts of the entry in this way was decided upon to facilitate special treatment of certain unique aspects of the Darwin materials. Although the date of an entry is usually placed in the margin in other calendars, it has been given its own line in this calendar so that endorsements, postmarks, and watermarks could be included in full; scholars long accustomed to undated or ambiguously-dated Darwin letters will find this feature useful for checking the dates assigned to undated or incompletely dated letters. The part consisting of the date always contains the year, month, day, and (if provided by Darwin) the day of the week, in that order, on which the letter was written, followed by endorsements, postmarks, watermarks, and other information pertaining to date; such additional dating aids are always given as nearly exactly as possible to how they were on the original, and they are preceded by abbreviations identifying each (e.g. "wmk." precedes the watermark). Editorial conventions and textual devices used with the date are discussed below in two special sections on such matters.

The description, comprising the second part of each entry, is in two sections. The first section gives, as a first element, the full name of the other principal for the item besides Darwin, and it indicates whether this person is the author or the recipient of the item. This first element would thus read "To Charles LYELL" for a letter from Darwin to Lyell. Note that the last name of the principal is given entirely in upper case letters to facilitate scanning of the entries. (This is only done for individuals.) The second element of the first section of the description provides Darwin's address at the time of writing, as indicated by Darwin himself at the head of each letter. If the address is one of the variants of Darwin's Down address, it will be given as "Down", followed by an indication of the number of the variant type that appears (see p. xxiii, above). Thus, if Darwin wrote "Down Bromley Kent" on a given letter, for example, this will be indicated by "Down (type 2)". If Darwin's whereabouts are not indicated, this will be signified by "no location". If the stationery used has a black mourning border, or if an ink of a distinctive color was used by the author in the writing of the letter, this will be noted in parentheses following the indication of Darwin's location. The two elements of the first section are separated from each other by a semicolon.

The second section of the description begins a new line below the first section. It consists of three parts: the descriptive abbreviation for the item (e.g. ALS); the dimensions of the item, in inches, with vertical dimension given first³⁶; and the number of pages of text, rounded up to the nearest whole number of pages. Descriptive abbreviations used are discussed in a separate section below. If there is an envelope, enclosure, or sketch, or if there is an address for, or an endorsement by, the recipient, this will be indicated following the number of pages. If the text of the letter indicates that there should be an enclosure, but there is none, this will be indicated by the phrase "(enclosure wanting)" following the number of pages. If the address for or the endorsement by the recipient occupies a separate page from the pages of text, indication of such address or endorsement will be separated from indication of the number of pages by "and". If such address and/or endorsement is written on the same page as a page of text, indication of such address or endorsement will be separated from indication of the number of pages by a comma. Thus, if a four-page letter, for example, has an endorsement on the top of the first page, above the text, it will be indicated "4p., end."; if the endorsement is on a separate, fifth page, it will be indicated "4p. and end." In other words, readers should always assume that the use of a comma in this instance means that the additional portion of the item is substantively, but not physically, distinct from what procedes the comma; use of the word "and" instead of a comma means that the additional portion is both substantively and physically distinct.

When there is either an address for Darwin's correspondent or an endorsement, it is reproduced fully in brackets following the indication of its existance. As there is such a large number of misspellings in these addresses and endorsements, "sic" was not employed to indicate them. Readers may assume a misspelling to have been made by Darwin or his correspondent. No attempt was made to identify with certainty the handwriting of endorsements, although those endorsements provided in the calendar are usually in the hands of Darwin's correspondents. As in the case of the date for each item, editorial conventions and textual devices used in the descriptive part of each entry are discussed below in the special sections on such matters.

The third part of each entry contains the abstract -- the real meat of the item. Radoff claims that "the question of how full the abstract should be has long been the bC*te noire of calendarers,"³⁷ and no statement about calendaring could be truer. After much consideration, reasonably full abstracts were deemed desirable, but a price -- namely the deletion of all textual matter which is published faithfully elsewhere and the rendering of the remaining textual matter in a complex way which is not exceptionally easy to read -- had to be paid for this comprehensiveness, so that the length of the calendar would not be prohibitive. Accordingly, if it is known that the item or any part of it has been published, a simple reference to the location of the printed text will be made in lieu of an abstract of this portion of text. As the completeness and the accuracy of such printed texts varies considerably, however, a series of standardized phrases are employed in the references to the locations of the printed texts, and substantive corrections are supplied. These standardized phrases -- arbitrarily designated as "printing conventions" -- are designed to convey a rough idea of the accuracy and the completeness of the printed texts; they are discussed below in a special section. The substantive corrections -- including abstracts of substantive deleted portions -- follow reference to the location of the printed text. Corrections are keyed into the printed text by reference to the page and line of printed text being corrected. If necessary to avoid ambiguity, the exact location within the given line also is provided. When there is other material on the same printed page as a letter which is being corrected, and a correction is indicated for, say, line 15, the reader should begin counting lines only where the text of the incorrect letter begins: in other words, in this case "line 15" means "line 15 of the letter being corrected," not "line 15 from the top of the page."

If no published version of any part of the item is known, an abstract of the entire text is provided. The abstracts treat every topic in the original texts; topics are usually (but not always) presented in the order in which Darwin presented them. Each abstract consists of a series of statements (not necessarily whole sentences) connected by semicolons. When a clause begins with a singular indicative verb (e.g. "asks") and no subject of the verb is given, Darwin is implied as the subject. When the verb is not singular and indicative (e.g. "ask"), it should be read as a command to the recipient. Substantial quotation is employed. Superscript arabic numerals in this and the preceding parts of each entry indicate substantial editorial additions and refer to the correspondingly numbered notes in the fourth part of the entry. Other editorial conventions and textual devices employed in this part of each entry are discussed below in special sections.

The fourth and final part of each entry consists of annotations to the preceding three parts. An effort was made to identify every reference to persons, places, things, publications, and events; if any of these is not identified clearly in an entry, the reader can assume that research upon it proved unsuccessful. Annotations contain the minimum of explanation or interpretation, for this is not the responsibility of an editor; primary objectives of the calendar annotations were identification and description.

Biographical information is not provided in the annotations to each entry, as this would have necessitated a great many biographical notes for each person, one for each entry in which he or she is mentioned. Instead, biographical information is provided in the biographical notes following the calendar.

Numbering of the annotations begins afresh for each entry. Sometimes one note (usually the first one) relates to more than one location in the entry, usually because a single annotation can explain how both the date and the recipient of the item were determined in the absence of explicit information in the original. To save space, and to avoid an excessive number of annotations, certain information such as Christian names and titles of books are provided in the abstract rather than in the notes wherever this information can be worked into the abstract reasonably smoothly. Use of the word "perhaps" in a note indicates that the material in the note is conjectural.

To some degree, the letters annotate each other, since there is often a run of letters on the same subject. Cross-references between two or more letters in which the same subject is discussed are kept to a minimum. Generally, those letters which are obviously part of a series of exchanges between Darwin and a given correspondent on some particular and very definite topic are referred only to the next earlier letter on the same topic. This allows readers to trace an exchange on a given topic backwards through time, once the last letter of the series is found.

Should readers wish at this time to see an example of the layout of the four parts of each entry, a good letter for study is that to Lyell dated August 25, [1845]; its entry is on page 18 below, and the first page of the manuscript letter is reproduced as Figure 3. This letter not only provides an example of the four parts of each entry but also allows readers to compare a typical calendar abstract against the original manuscript, thereby getting some notion of the thoroughness and reliability of the abstracts.

Additional discussions of minutiae of editorial policy appear at the head of the list of acronyms, abbreviations, and short titles given below, as well as at the head of the biographical notes following the calendar. Finally, in those few locations where editorial additions might easily be interpreted as part of the original item, the initials of the editor ("PTC") have been added to identify the material as editorially added.

A calendar, unlike a letterpress edition, provides comprehensive faithfulness to the original manuscript only in certain portions of each entry. This imposes upon the calendarer the additional preliminary editorial chore of indicating precisely which parts of each entry are direct quotations from the original and which are not. In this calendar, an attempt has been made to preserve in each entry as much as possible of the original manuscript.

Subject to the editorial conventions to be outlined below, the following portions of each entry are to be considered as exact transcriptions from the original Darwin letter: the date (i.e. the first part of the entry), including watermarks, postmarks, and endorsements; the name of Darwin's correspondent (i.e. the first element of the first section of the description); Darwin's address (i.e. the second element of the first section of the description), except where the address was a variant Down address, in which case the shorthand form described earlier is used; the endorsement and the address of Darwin's correspondent, if these are provided in the original; those portions of the abstract which are enclosed in inverted commas (hereafter referred to as "quoted portions"); and the factual data (dates, names, titles of books, etc.) in those portions of the abstract not enclosed in inverted commas (i.e. "unquoted portions"). Only the earliest decipherable postmark is provided, and only that portion of a watermark indicating the date is given.

In each of these exactly-transcribed locations -- with the exception of addresses, endorsements, postmarks, and watermarks, which are discussed below -- the following rules apply: if the word, phrase, or clause is doubtful, the passage in doubt is enclosed in brackets and followed by a question mark ("?"). When more than one reading is plausible, the several readings are all enclosed in a single set of brackets, and each reading is followed by its own question mark (e.g. "[these? those?]"). Editorial additions are enclosed in brackets without a question mark. If the editorial addition is conjectural, it will be enclosed in brackets and preceded by a question mark. Deletions from the text are denoted by ellipsis points ("..."). Passages in parentheses are parenthetical matter from the original. See the section of textual devices below for a graphic representation of these rules.

Exception to these rules must be made in the case of addresses, endorsements, postmarks, and watermarks because, although they are faithful transcriptions of the original manuscript, these elements are always enclosed within brackets, as a matter of course, in order to set them off from contiguous matter of a different nature. To be specific, watermarks and postmarks are given with the date provided by Darwin; they are enclosed in brackets to prevent their being confused with the date which Darwin himself wrote. Similarly, addresses and endorsements are inserted as part of the description of the item; they are bracketed to set them off from this descriptive matter, the latter having been added editorially. In these special cases, matter in parentheses consists of either portions which are added by the calendarer, are dubious readings, or are found in parentheses in the original; which of these alternatives applies in each case is either clear from the context or is explained by a note.³⁸ Also, in these places where the bracket rules are exceptional, deletions are still denoted by ellipsis points and question marks preceding and following passages have the same meaning as in other locations. In the address for and the endorsement by Darwin's correspondent, as well as in the postmark, transition from one line of manuscript to the next is indicated by the slash ("/"); these transitions are not noted in any other portion of each entry.

In all locations, titles of office, such as "Mr.", "Mrs.", "Capt.", or Sir", are omitted except in cases in which Darwin gave such titles in the original and the title is or may be important in identifying the person to whom it refers. Also, occasionally a title of office (esp. titles of rank or royalty such as "Captain", "Colonel", or "Lady") will be retained to set endpoints for an otherwise undated letter by reference to the years during which the person had the title. (This only works, of course, if the person in question was elevated to a higher rank at a later time; otherwise, one might keep the same title for life.)

Names of persons are given fully enough in each location in which they appear so that a positive identification can be made. Those parts of the full name not provided by Darwin are, of course, enclosed in brackets. Sometimes, when necessary to distinguish between two persons with the same name (e.g. father and son), a title of honor or other distinguishing appellation will be annexed in brackets to the name, even if the title had not been conferred at the time the letter was written. An example of such an anachronistic usage is the addition of "Baron Avebury" to the name of John William Lubbock the younger (1834-1913) whenever it appears in letters written before he became a baron. Another anachronistic practice is the inclusion of a woman's married name before the date of her marriage (e.g. "Henrietta Emma Darwin Litchfield" before her marriage to Litchfield). In the case of multiple appearances of the same person's name in a single letter, the full name will be given only at the first encounter; succeeding references will be to surname only.

In the quoted portions of the abstract, Darwin's marginal notes, postscripts, stray marks, and marginal