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The Observer, 22 June 2008
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The Times, Body & Soul, 17 May 2008
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The Year 2009 will mark the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth on 12 February 1809, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of ‘Origin of Species,’ in November 1859.
Constance Holden, Science, 9 March 2007
To celebrate the 200th Anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, a pair of Brits have gotten together to build a working replica of HMS Beagle, the ship that bore Darwin around the world.
The HMS Beagle Project Wales, founded by David Lort-Phillips, a Welsh farmer, and British environmental writer Peter McGrath, intends the ship as a sailing classroom and laboratory. Identical to the original on the outside, the $6.4 million, privately funded ship will be furnished with 21st century navigation, safety, and communications equipment.
For its first voyage, the replica, crewed by 30 scientists and sailors, will sail around the world following the path of the original beagle in the 1831-36 voyage that inspired Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. After that, scientists will be able to use the new Beagle for research, primarily on climate change, says McGrath. One project he is considering is using the Beagle’s logs to compare the climate of the 1830s with that of today. Broadcasts of experiments as well as lectures will be available o labs and classrooms around the world via an as-yet-unbuilt Web site.
The project is intended to put some “awe back into science” and attract more young people to the field, says McGrath: “We need to use props like the Beagle to get their pulses to quicken”. Construction is to begin early next year in Milford Haven, Wales.
Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) of Lichfield was arguably the most brilliant mind of his age, and if that overused tag of genius could be applied to anyone, it could be given to him.
To say that Darwin’s ideas were ahead of their time is an understatement. He was outlining the trick of evolution years before his grandson; he first described photosynthesis and proposed the idea of the Big Bang; he broke with the Lunar Society in abandoning the theory of phlogiston.
He had a keen interest in geology, systems of transport, mechanics, languages, steam power…The list is endless.
Yet perhaps the most endearing feature of the man was the least public. Erasmus Darwin was one of the most entertaining letter writers of the 18th century.
All the Lunar Society members were prodigious writers of letters. It was, after all, their only means of direct communication other than meeting up.
But only in the case of Darwin has all the correspondence been collected and published.
This has much to do with the considerable efforts of Desmond King-Hele, who has been championing the cause for many years now.
What first appeared as a selection of correspondence, both from and to the man, has now become The Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin is published by Cambridge University Press, £90.
Darwin has writing for practically his whole life. The first letter in the book is an epistle in rhyming couplets sent to his sister, Susannah.
It concludes. “Wherefore, to end my senseless rhyme and jarring, I now conclude, your brother, Erasmus Darwin.”
That was written at the age of 15.
Fifty five years later, on April 17 1802, Erasmus was still writing, this time to his long-standing friend (and fellow Lunatick) Richard Lovell Edgeworth, who was over in Ireland.
In it Darwin commented on the troubles in Ireland, and spoke of his family’s recent move to Breadsall priory in Derbyshire. There was an invitation to Edgeworth and his daughter to visit them.
The letter was never completed, for Darwin died suddenly the following morning.
One of the servants – Sophie Mainwaring – took up the unfinished letter, added a few sentences of explanation and sent it away.
One of the things that makes Darwin’s letters so readable (then and now) is the absence of small talk.
What greetings and gossip he has is usually relegated to the final sentence or two. The openings are, in general, a case of vertical take-off.
His letter to Benjamin Franklin of July 1772 begins like this: “Dear Sir, I was unfortunate in not being able to go to Birmingham till a day after you left it.
The apparatus you constructed with the bladder and funnel I took into my pond the next day, whilst I was bathing, and filled the bladder with the unmixed air that rose from the muddy bottom, and tying it up. Brought it home, and then pricking the bladder with a pin, I applied the flame of a candle to it at all distances, but it showed no tendency to catch fire.”
How the people of Lichfield reacted to what their doctor was up to is not recorded. Darwin would not have noticed: his mind was on muddier matters.