Charles Darwin's Letters: A Selection 1825-1859

Charles Darwin's Letters: A Selection 1825-1859. FREDERICK BURKHARDT, ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996. xxvi + 249 pp., biographical register, index. (ISBN 0-512-56212-0 cloth).

The multi-volume Correspondence of Charles Darwin that has been appearing since 1985 has been lavishly praised by reviewers, including me, and for the best of reasons. The advantage to having as complete and accurate a transcript of the correspondence as possible, including the letters to which Darwin was responding, can hardly be underestimated. Furthermore, an enormous amount of labor has been devoted to providing background material such as chronologies and references to the contemporary literature. The editorial commentary succeeds admirably in its goal of placing the letters in context and making them intelligible to the reader.

However, the nine thick volumes that have appeared thus far are not the sort of thing that one polishes off in a weekend, and the price is a bit stiff for most readers- personal libraries. Therefore the editor of the series, Frederick Burkhardt, has attempted to make a brief "selection representative of the larger work and to provide a trustworthy portrayal of Darwin's mind, personality, and method of work as well as an account of the important stages of his development from a student to the author of the work that has transformed our understanding of nature and mankind."

Having encountered all too many anthologies and abridgements that delete some of the most interesting materials, I was very skeptical of this one, and read it in conjunction with the original, checking all of the ellipsis periods to make sure that something important had not been left out. Given the size of the book, I can hardly see how Burkhardt could have come up with a better, or more representative, selection. How easy it would have been to neglect the vast researches on the evolution of barnacles! The most I can say by way of criticism is that having only one side of the correspondence, and only a minimum of commentary, sometimes leaves the reader in the dark. For example, in the dispute between Richard Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley to which the correspondence refers, it is far from obvious that they were arguing about how one reconstructs living organisms from just a few bones.

What there is of Burkhardt's commentary is quite good, but I would have liked to see it as footnotes rather than end-notes, and more of it as linking commentary in the text. There is a foreword by Stephen Jay Gould, but it reads like a jacket-blurb, consists largely of quotations from the text, and distracts one's attention from the much more informative and useful introduction by Burkhardt. MICHAEL T. GHISELIN Center for the History and Philosophy of Science California Academy of Sciences Golden Gate Park San Francisco, California 94118

Copyright Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Apr 1997
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