Volume 24, Number 14 · September 15, 1977
What Was Wrong With Darwin?
By W.W. Bartley III
To Be an Invalid: The Illness of Charles Darwin
by Ralph Colp Jr., M.D.
University of Chicago Press, 285 pp., $17.50
The Collected Papers of Charles Darwin
edited by Paul H. Barrett
University of Chicago Press, two volumes, 603 pp., $40.00
Charles Darwin was one of the most productive and attractive—as well as one of the most creative—of the Victorians. In the forty-one years between 1839 and 1881, he published twenty-one books and some 150 learned papers (the latter now gathered together in two volumes by Paul H. Barrett of Michigan State University). These books and articles were beautifully, and vigorously, written and composed. They covered an immense territory—geology, geography, botany, zoology, biology, anthropology—with theoretical, argumentative, and descriptive precision. Though most of this work was written well over a century ago, it still speaks with a crisp and engaging authority, based on direct experience; and it is permeated with a good-humored modesty and a generosity toward opponents that bespeak immense power.
Review, 3588 words
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