The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume 12, 1864, Cambridge
University Press, £55, ISBN 0521590345
FOR YOUR cousin addicted to txt msgng, there can be no better gift than this
latest instalment of Charles Darwin’s correspondence: 734 pages of prose from
just one year. Yet there is little in these letters that suggests the upheaval
that the idea of evolution was producing in Victorian life and on the
international scene—just four years after the famous clash between
evolution and religion at a British Association for the Advancement of Science
meeting in Oxford.
The letters, of course, are written in elegant…
