‘Exceptional’: rare books of illustrations from Darwin’s ‘bird man’ on sale for £2m

Posted on May 4, 2024 by Admin

The set of folios published by John Gould will be presented at Firsts book fair in London in mid-May

John Gould was one of the most sought-after taxidermists in 19th-century London, commissioned by King George IV to stuff the first giraffe to arrive in England.

But Gould’s lasting legacy is birds. He travelled the world documenting and cataloguing as many avian species as he could find, many of them never seen before, earning him the nickname the Bird Man and the appointment as official “bird stuffer” to the Zoological Society.

The French aristocrat who understood evolution 100 years before Darwin – and even worried about climate change

Posted on April 7, 2024 by Admin

Georges-Louis Leclerc proposed species change and extinction back in the 1740s, a new book reveals

Shortly after Charles Darwin published his magnum opus, The Origin of Species, in 1859 he started reading a little-known 100-year-old work by a wealthy French aristocrat.

Its contents were quite a surprise. “Whole pages [of his book] are laughably like mine,” Darwin wrote to a friend. “It is surprising how candid it makes one to see one’s view in another man’s words.”

In later editions of The Origin of Species, Darwin acknowledged Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, as one of the “few” people who had understood that species change and evolve, before Darwin himself.

Rare orchid flourishes in Charles Darwin’s gardens after two-year project

Posted on August 22, 2022 by Admin

Unusually the violet helleborine is only pollinated by wasps and is thriving thanks to nectar that is irresistible to the insects

A rare orchid that reproduces by getting wasps drunk is thriving in the gardens of Charles Darwin’s house after a two-year restoration programme.

The violet helleborine is entirely pollinated by wasps, which are usually not perceived to be the best pollinators. They’re regimented and meticulously clean themselves, scientists say, which makes the process of pollination a fairly futile prospect – there’s nothing for the pollen to cling to.

How should we address Charles Darwin’s complicated legacy?

Posted on February 13, 2021 by Admin

The Descent of Man, 150 years old this month, is a work of humanist brilliance – yet its errors, particularly on gender, now make for uncomfortable reading

“Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” That sentence is the sole reference to human evolution in Charles Darwin’s masterwork On the Origin of Species, which in 1859 set down the theory that explains how life on Earth has evolved. Darwin had entirely excluded humans from his scheme. That tease comes in the final chapter, almost like a post-credit scene in a superhero movie, as if to simply say: “To be continued…”

The sequel did come, in the form of The Descent of Man, published in February 1871. All of Darwin’s canon is worth reading (though the one about worms and vegetable mould is perhaps a bit niche), but The Descent of Man is my favourite, because it is the one where he holds humans up to the light. Darwin was a great writer, and the prose is typically grand: