Charles Darwin – In London‘the success of this my first literary child always tickles my vanity more than any of
my other books’. Darwin sent a copy with a covering letter to the great Alexander
von Humboldt, who had been Darwin’s inspiration to visit South America. Humboldt
wrote in return declaring it an admirable book and saying that Darwin had an excellent
future ahead of him:
You told me in your kind letter that, when you were young, the manner in which I studied
and depicted nature in the torrid zones contributed toward exciting in you the ardour and
desire to travel in distant lands. Considering the importance of your work, Sir, this may be
the greatest success that my humble work could bring.During the years since the return of the Beagle, Darwin had always been thinking
about the meaning of the Galapagos finches. They were not, as he had initially thought,
just variations of the familiar birds found on the mainland, but as identified by the
ornithologist John Gould they were different species. Why should these islands share
a group of related species unknown anywhere else in the world? And why should each
individual island have its own unique species? The implications were revolutionary.
Since species were thought to be fixed, did this mean that God was continuously
creating new ones? He had probably come to some conclusions because in the second
edition of The Voyage of the Beagle he rewrote part of this chapter, adding some
carefully crafted yet still ambiguous words:
Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of
birds, one might really fancy that from the original paucity in the archipelago, one species
has been taken and modified for different ends.Darwin was not yet ready to make any definitive conclusions on that mystery of
mysteries – the first appearance of new beings on this earth – but perhaps there was
someone else who would.
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