List of illustrations; List of letters; Introduction; Acknowledgments; List of provenances; Note on editorial policy; Darwin/Wedgwood genealogy; Abbreviations and symbols; The correspondence; Appendix I. Translations; Appendix II. Chronology; Appendix III. Diplomas; Appendix IV. Reviews of Forms of flowers; Manuscript alterations and comments; Biographical register and index to correspondents; Bibliography; Notes on manuscript sources; Index.
Letters from 1878, when Darwin experimented with his son Francis on plant movements such as sleep and circumnutation.
Frederick Burkhardt (1912–2007), the founder of the Darwin Correspondence Project, was President of Bennington College, Vermont (1947–57), and President of the American Council of Learned Societies (1957–74). Before founding the Darwin Correspondence Project in 1974, he was already at work on an edition of the papers of the philosopher William James. He received the Modern Language Association of America's first Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters in 1991, the Founder's Medal of the Society for the History of Natural History in 1997, the Thomas Jefferson Gold Medal of the American Philosophical Society in 2003 and a special citation for outstanding service to the history of science from the History of Science Society in 2005. James A. Secord has served as Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project since 2006. He is also Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ's College. Besides his work for the Darwin Project, his research focuses on the history of science from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. His book, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (2001) won the Pfizer Prize of the History of Science Society. He has recently written on scientific conversation, scrapbook-keeping and public scientific displays.
'In the letters of a single year, both to and from Darwin, edited
with consummate scholarship and a nice sense of balance in the
footnotes, which illuminate without overwhelming the text, the
small points build into a picture. Darwin himself appears in
close-up from the intimate angles of everday life, while through
the correspondence the changing temper of the times reverberates.
… the large questions are never far away. Evolution itself
and the working out of evolutionary theory pervade the letters as
they pervaded the age.' Rosemary Hill, London Review of Books
'The context of each letter is outlined with fine footnotes, there
is a brief biography of all correspondents and a thorough, easily
searchable index. Pleasure guaranteed for all with an interest in
the history of science.' Paul Ashton, The Biologist
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