Scientific Illustration

smithsonianlibraries:

February 12, 1809 Charles Darwin was born. To commemorate this, and the impending Valentine’s day holiday, some musings on marriage from our beloved Chuck D. courtesy of Darwin online.

excerpts from Darwin, C. R. ‘This is the Question Marry Not Marry’ [Memorandum on marriage]. (7.1838) CUL-DAR210.8.2 (Darwin Online, http://darwin-online.org.uk/)

This is the question

Marry
Children — (if it Please God) — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, — object to be beloved & played with. — —better than a dog anyhow. — Home, & someone to take care of house — Charms of music & female chit-chat. — These things good for one’s health. — Forced to visit & receive relations but terrible loss of time. —
W My God, it is intolerable to think of spending ones whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won’t do. — Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps — Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St.
Marry — Marry — Marry Q.E.D.

Not Marry
No children, (no second life), no one to care for one in old age.— What is the use of working ‘in’ without sympathy from near & dear friends—who are near & dear friends to the old, except relatives
Freedom to go where one liked — choice of Society & little of it. — Conversation of clever men at clubs — Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle. — to have the expense & anxiety of children — perhaps quarelling — Loss of time. — cannot read in the Evenings — fatness & idleness — Anxiety & responsibility — less money for books &c — if many children forced to gain one’s bread. — (But then it is very bad for ones health to work too much)
Perhaps my wife wont like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool —

more Darwin:
Charles Darwin’s library on the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Our first edition of On the Origin of Species also on BHL.

brodyface:

Darwin’s first example of the ‘tree of life’, beautiful.

unhistorical:

December 27, 1831: The HMS Beagle embarks on its second voyage, with Charles Darwin aboard.

Twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin boarded the Beagle, a sloop captained by one Robert Fitzroy, an amateur naturalist and a prospective parson. The expedition was to last two years, though it ended up lasting five, taking the Beagle and its crew across the Atlantic, around the coasts of South America, and eventually around the Earth. The main objective of the voyage was to conduct hydrographic surveys, but it was the ship’s young “gentleman naturalist”, hired almost as an afterthought, who cemented the trip’s place in history. 

The Beagle set sail from Plymouth on December 27, 1831. Darwin was ill-suited for life at sea, commenting that “the misery I endured from seasickness is far beyond what I ever guessed”; luckily, he spent much of his time exploring and theorizing on land rather than sailing at sea. In Punta Alta, Argentina, Darwin discovered giant fossils of extinct mammals. On an island near Chile, he witnessed a volcano and earthquake that levelled cities and altered the coastline. In 1835 he arrived at the Galápagos Islands where he briefly observed his famous finches without bothering to label and categorize them properly. On the islands he noted that “by far the most remarkable feature in the natural history of this archipelago” was “that the different islands to a considerable extent are inhabited by a different set of beings”. 

By the time he returned to England, Darwin had established his reputation as a respected up-and-coming geologist among the country’s elite scientific circles. In the years following his return, Darwin wrote extensively on his five-year journey. Between 1838 and 1843 The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, a book Darwin edited, was published in five different parts, and in 1839 he published The Voyage of the Beagle. Neither work directly addressed evolution or natural selection, although Darwin was most certainly formulating his theories by that time, and in fact he may have been pondering the idea during the voyage. Although it would take years of further research, Darwin conceded in the introduction of his 1859 work On the Origin of Species, which presented his theory of evolution by natural selection, that his travels with the Beagle played a key role in formulating the theory:

WHEN on board H.M.S. ‘Beagle,’ as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species—that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of our greatest philosophers.

(via dendroica)

atelierentomologica:

Charicature of Charlies Darwin by his student friend, Albert Way

mudwerks:

(via Cartoon Portraits of Leading 19th Century Figures (1873) | The Public Domain Review)

Charles Darwin

…Cartoon Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Men of the Day (1873) with drawings by Frederick Watty… 

book-aesthete:

Two works by Charles Darwin
D. Appleton & Company. New York, 1896.

Includes: Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World. * Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands and Parts of South America Visited During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle. Two volumes, original half red morocco and marbled boards. Reprints.

Formation of Vegetable Mould by APS Museum on Flickr.

Pig by APS Museum on Flickr.

Charles Darwin. Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. 1868.

workman:

thinkorsmile:

I think

Charles DARWIN. Tree of Life / A reproduction of the first-known sketch of an evolutionary tree describing the relationships among groups of organisms 
© Syndics of Cambridge University Library

via chromaticities

ulaulaman:

Darwin’s first sketch of the tree of life from one origin.

Note the cross-bars for extinction — and that change is not conceived with some direction-as-progress. And notice Darwin’s simple words introducing the sketch, “I think…”

(image source: Into the diagram; text source: Kasama)