About this book
This highly illustrated collection of short essays provides a critical assessment of Darwin both as a person and a scientist, and provides a factual and engaging account of the collections held at Cambridge University.
Giving a sense of Darwin's youth and energy at the time of the Beagle voyage, and portraying his life and work in the context of the lives and work of others, including his family, this is an engaging account of the significance of Darwin's observations for his contemporaries and how his ideas inform modern science.
Contents
Foreword;
1. All idle men and entomologists;
2. Darwin material at Christ's;
3. Whirled around the world in a Ten Gun Brig;
4. The Darwin Archive at Cambridge University Library;
5. A little reading, thinking and hammering;
6. Not a finished naturalist;
7. The Darwin collection in the University Herbarium;
8. Troubled spirits of another world;
9. A certain hunter of beetles and pounder of rocks;
10. The Darwin specimens in the Sedgwick Museum;
11. Misery and vexation of spirit;
12. Curious formed valleys, petrified shells, volcanoes and strange scenery;
13. For such facts would undermine the stability of species;
14. The Darwin collections in the Zoology Museum;
15. I hope my wanderings will not unfit me for a quiet life; Acknowledgements;
Further reading;
About the contributors.
Customer Reviews
Biography
Alison M. Pearn is Assistant Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project.