Where Australia Collides with Asiain his journey towards an understanding of the origin of species. Darwin wrote in a
private letter:
I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell’s brains and that I never acknowledged
this sufficiently ... the great merit of the Principles, was that it altered the whole tone of
one’s mind, and therefore that when seen a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it partially
through his eyes.Darwin obtained a Treasury grant of 1000 to edit the descriptions by the experts
of his collections and published them in five volumes titled The Zoology of the
Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle complete with lavishly illustrated hand-coloured plates. The
volumes include an account of the fossil mammals by Professor Owen, the living
mammals by Waterhouse, the birds by John Gould, the fish by the Reverend L. Jenyns,
and the reptiles by Thomas Bell. Before leaving the Beagle, Darwin had agreed to
contribute a third volume to FitzRoy’s narrative of the voyages of the Adventure and
the Beagle from 1826 to 1830 and then the Beagle from 1831 to 1836. Writing to his
cousin he said:
In your last letter you urge me, to get ready the book. I am now hard at work and give up
everything else for it. Our plan is as follows. – Capt. FitzRoy writes two volumes, out of
the materials collected during both the last voyage under Captain King to Tierra del Fuego
and during the circumnavigation. – I am to have the third volume, in which I intend giving
a kind of journal of a naturalist, not following however always the order of time, but rather
the order of position. – The habits of animals will occupy a large portion, sketches of the
geology, the appearance of the country, and personal details will make the hodge-podge
complete.Darwin spent the next two years writing and revising the narrative account of his
five years on the Beagle. FitzRoy took even longer to complete his first two volumes,
but their work was finally completed and both were published in 1939 as a three-
volume set entitled Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of HMS Adventure and Beagle
between the Years 1826 and 1836 describing their examination of the southern shores
of South America and Beagle’s circumnavigation of the Globe. Darwin’s third volume
was inauspiciously titled Journal and Remarks, 1832–1836. Darwin was able to fuse
both scientific writing with poetic description and when the reviews appeared his
volume was praised and FitzRoy’s volumes ignored. The three volumes could be
purchased separately and Darwin’s soon became a bestseller requiring both a reprint
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