F1574a    Pamphlet:     de Beer, Gavin ed. 1960. Darwin's notebooks on transmutation of species. Part I. First notebook [B] (July 1837-February 1838). Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). Historical Series 2 (2) (January): 23-73.   Text   Image   PDF

work . The clock had been provided with a mainspring. There is another point on which the First Notebook throws light, for it contains a splendid discussion of the principle of branching and sub-branching of the evolutionary tree (pp. 21, 22), and this shows that Darwin had already grasped fully the principle of divergence. This emerges also from his query whether Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire visualized evolution as having taken place in straight or in branching lines (p. 113). The question naturally

F3484    Book contribution:     Darwin, C. R. 1909. [Letter to F. W. Hope, 1837, 19 letters to R. Trimen, 1863-71]. In E. B. Poulton ed. Charles Darwin and the Origin of species: addresses, etc., in America and England in the year of the two anniversaries. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.   Text

far the species of the same genus differ in the ocelli. As I know from your Orchid Drawings how skilful an artist you are, perhaps it would not give you much more trouble to sketch any variable ocelli than to describe them.—I am very much obliged to you for so kindly assisting 1 For a further account of this and other uses of these markings, together with references to the Original memoirs, see' eye-spots' in index of Essays on Evolution (1908), 424. [page] 23

F1574a    Pamphlet:     de Beer, Gavin ed. 1960. Darwin's notebooks on transmutation of species. Part I. First notebook [B] (July 1837-February 1838). Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). Historical Series 2 (2) (January): 23-73.   Text   Image   PDF

simplification. cf. also Jean Rostand. L' tat pr sent du transformisme, Paris 1931, p. 13. 2 Charles Lyell. Principles of Geology, London 1832. vol. 2, p. II which contains the first use in English of the term evolution in its present accepted sense. 3 Eiseley. Charles Darwin, Edward Blyth, and the theory of natural selection. Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc. vol. 103, 1959, p. 108. 4 Sir Ronald Fisher. Retrospect of the criticisms of the theory of natural selection , Evolution as a Process edited by Julian

F1574a    Pamphlet:     de Beer, Gavin ed. 1960. Darwin's notebooks on transmutation of species. Part I. First notebook [B] (July 1837-February 1838). Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). Historical Series 2 (2) (January): 23-73.   Text   Image   PDF

will be profitable to consider the legacies of Darwin's immediate predecessors and the contributions of his contemporaries that were known to him. First comes Erasmus Darwin.4 Erasmus Darwin believed in the transmutation of species and evolution because of the observed changes undergone by organisms during their life-history, the changes brought about by domestication and resulting from hybridization, and monstrous 1 William Sharp MacLeay. Horae entomologicae, London 1819-21. The Quinarian System

F1574a    Pamphlet:     de Beer, Gavin ed. 1960. Darwin's notebooks on transmutation of species. Part I. First notebook [B] (July 1837-February 1838). Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). Historical Series 2 (2) (January): 23-73.   Text   Image   PDF

to Lyell about the succession of forms, Darwin forgot that he had himself published a paper on this subject in 1837. In 1860 when writing4 to Baden Powell he excused himself for not having given a list of his predecessors who rejected special creation, saying that he had attempted no history of the subject; yet later on the same day he remembered that he had a year or two previously drafted a Historical Sketch for his large work on evolution, in which Powell's name was mentioned with honour. All

F1574b    Pamphlet:     de Beer, Gavin ed. 1960. Darwin's notebooks on transmutation of species. Part II. Second notebook [C] (February to July 1838). Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). Historical Series 2 (3) (May): 75-118.   Text   Image   PDF

varieties of many ages standing will not readily breed together (II 30). This may be compared with T. H. Huxley's caveat that Darwin had not proved his point until he could show that natural selection had led to sterility between divergent products of evolution. Darwin realized this diffi- 1cf. Developments in the study of animal communications by P. Marler, in Darwin's Biological Works, edited by P. R. Bell, Cambridge 1959, pp. 150-206. [page] 7

F1574c    Pamphlet:     de Beer, Gavin ed. 1960. Darwin's notebooks on transmutation of species. Part III. Third notebook [D] (July 15 to October 2nd 1838). Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). Historical Series 2 (4) (July):119-150.   Text   Image   PDF

these principles and used this argument for the express purpose of discrediting the theory of evolution by natural selection. Other critics, more recent, have accepted Darwin's conclusions but claimed that he was mistaken in thinking that he had arrived at them inductively and even reproached him for speculating in his Notebooks, as if it was reprehensible. Darwin himself always maintained that he had used induction and wrote1 in his Autobiography that he worked on the true Baconian principles

F1574c    Pamphlet:     de Beer, Gavin ed. 1960. Darwin's notebooks on transmutation of species. Part III. Third notebook [D] (July 15 to October 2nd 1838). Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). Historical Series 2 (4) (July):119-150.   Text   Image   PDF

he was in the possession of the key of natural selection, Darwin worked by a combination of induction and deduction to construct the full theory of evolution by natural selection, as Sir Julian Huxley2 and I3 have shown. But this belongs to a stage in the development of Darwin's thought later than is represented by the first three Notebooks on Transmutation of Species, and is found in the Fourth Notebook, the Sketch of 1842, and the Essay of 1844. The remainder of the Third Notebook is largely

F1574d    Pamphlet:     de Beer, Gavin ed. 1960. de Beer, G. ed. 1960. Darwin's notebooks on transmutation of species. Part IV, Fourth notebook [E] (October 1838-10 July 1839). Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). Historical Series 2 (5) (September): 151-183.   Text   Image   PDF

those who solved the problem of evolution and natural selection are by no means complete, but it is already possible to see two curious patterns in the history of thought. The first relates to the manner in which arguments have simply been turned upside down as a result of progress of knowledge. The foremost example of this reversal of direction is the fate of Paley's arguments aimed at proving that the adaptations of plants and animals to their environment show evidence of purposive design.2 First

F1574d    Pamphlet:     de Beer, Gavin ed. 1960. de Beer, G. ed. 1960. Darwin's notebooks on transmutation of species. Part IV, Fourth notebook [E] (October 1838-10 July 1839). Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History). Historical Series 2 (5) (September): 151-183.   Text   Image   PDF

though he had available to him all the basic ingredients out of which Fisher constructed his synthesis, Bateson was blinded by the clean-cut results of such Mendelian crosses as were known to him, appearing to have arisen ready-made without selection, and this prejudiced him against Darwinian selection. He was eventually driven to the untenable view that evolution had been stopped down at the start, and had occurred through the successive removal of inhibitory factors.1 The lesson to be