Charles Darwin Origin Of Species & Voyage of the beagle

Easily the most influential book published in the nineteenth century, Darwin's The Origin of Species is also that most unusual phenomenon, an altogether.
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In the remainder of this essay, I offer some considerations on the voyage of the Beagle as a literary event—an event in the history of representation.


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Scientifically, he attends to the controversial phenomena of human history as well as the ramifying branches of natural history. As the force of impressions generally depends on preconceived ideas, I may add, that all mine were taken from the vivid descriptions in the Personal Narrative of Humboldt, which far exceed in merit any thing I have read on the subject. Yet with these high-wrought ideas, my feelings were far from partaking of any tinge of disappointment on first landing on the shores of Brazil. Journal of Researches Even in the blaze of his first excitement Darwin recognizes a mediated, temporally extensive, typically Romantic structure of aesthetic experience.

Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man; whether those of Brazil, where the powers of Life are predominant, or those of Tierra del Fuego , where Death and Decay prevail. The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind,—if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over,—if turning to admire the splendour of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention.

The mind is a chaos of delight. In a new epiphany of the world, the imagination opens onto the plenitude of life itself as a dynamic totality of organic relations: Its temporal structure is one of uncanny recurrence—haunting—rather than instantaneous rapture. But its hold is no less compelling:. In calling up images of the past, I find the plains of Patagonia frequently cross before my eyes: They are characterized only by negative possessions; without habitations, without water, without trees, without mountains, they support merely a few dwarf plants.

Why then, and the case is not peculiar to myself, have these arid wastes taken so firm possession of the memory? I can scarcely analyze these feelings: Its full effect is felt at a temporal distance from the event, in memory and reflection. Darwin puts that freedom to work. All was stillness and desolation. One reflected how many ages the plain had thus lasted, and how many more it was doomed thus to continue. Yet in passing over these scenes, without one bright object near, an ill-defined but strong sense of pleasure is vividly excited.

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None can reply—all seems eternal now. The wilderness has a mysterious tongue Which teaches awful doubt. Summarizing his analysis of Patagonian tertiary formations in the edition, Darwin comments in When we consider that all these pebbles, countless as the grains of sand in the desert, have been derived from the slow falling of masses of rock on the old coast-lines and banks of rivers; and that these fragments have been dashed into smaller pieces, and that each of them has since been slowly rolled, rounded, and far transported, the mind is stupified in thinking over the long, absolutely necessary, lapse of years.

Darwin rationalizes and domesticates the sublime by calibrating it to the gradualist scale of everyday life: The minute-by-minute, microscopic accretion of phenomena piles up across the overwhelming magnitudes of geological time, raising mountain ranges, shearing continents.

Later, Darwin listens to the white noise of the Andean river Maipu , caused by the friction of pebbles swept along by the flood:. It is not possible for the mind to comprehend, except by a slow process, any effect which is produced by a cause repeated so often, that the multiplier itself ceases to convey any more definite idea, than the savage receives when he points to the hairs of his head.

Where the savage may fail, Darwin must succeed, since the savage also indexes the historical coordinates of this geological meditation in the scales of the life sciences and human history: These passages open onto a disjunction between different timescales, that of geological history and that of everyday human life, which is so enormous as to make them seem incommensurable. On a terrestrial scale, Darwin commits his thinking to a Lyellian history of gradual, incremental transformations over vast extents of time. The great Chilean earthquake of February see Fig. This produces a representational crisis—a breakdown of the relation between language, knowledge and feeling:.

Remains of the Cathedral of Concepcion after the earthquake, sketched by John Clemens Wickham, reproduced with permission from John van Wyhe ed. I have not attempted to give any detailed description of the appearance of Concepcion , for I feel it is quite impossible to convey the mingled feelings with which one beholds such a spectacle. Several of the officers visited it before me, but their strongest language failed to communicate a just idea of the desolation.

It is a bitter and humiliating thing to see works, which have cost men so much time and labour, overthrown in one minute; yet compassion for the inhabitants is almost instantly forgotten, from the interest excited in finding that state of things produced in a moment of time, which one is accustomed to attribute to a succession of ages.

In my opinion, we have scarcely beheld since leaving England, any other sight so deeply interesting.

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Darwin argues that extinction occurs gradually, with members of a population dwindling by units over many generations, rather than perishing in an instantaneous crash. Extinction, in other words, is not so much an event —a historical phenomenon—as it is a process —a natural phenomenon:. To admit that species generally become rare before they become extinct—to feel no surprise at the comparative rarity of one species with another, and yet to call in some extraordinary agent and to marvel greatly when a species ceases to exist, appears to me much the same as to admit that sickness in the individual is the prelude to death—to feel no surprise at sickness—but when the sick man dies, to wonder, and to believe that he died through violence.

Darwin was fond enough of this reflection, inserted in the edition of the Journal , to repeat it in the Origin of Species The analogy with human fatalities through sickness and violence is suggestive, since the politically organized elimination of human populations is one of the phenomena Darwin observes in the course of his voyage. While he is able to represent the earthquake as an exceptional intrusion of natural forces into human history, and thus to articulate its catastrophic violence in terms of a collision of scales, here Darwin finds himself viewing extinction as an event that happens fully inside human history—the world history of European colonization that his circumnavigation advances.

Rosas is a picturesque warlord out of Scott. The relation of historical distance allows Darwin a set of modulated responses to the campaign, including a cool acceptance of the inevitability if not necessity of the genocide, horror at reported atrocities, and even a regret at the vanishing of the wild savages. Figure 5 top left: Mazeppa, by Horace Vernet He observes dejected bands of aborigines straggling across the Australian colony:.

Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.

The Origin of Species and the Voyage of the Beagle

We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope , and Australia, and we find the same result. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. See all 17 reviews. Most recent customer reviews. Published on April 19, Published on August 13, Published on January 18, Published on November 20, Published on January 22, Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers.


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The Origin of Species/The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin

A republication of the book in introduced the title The Voyage of the "Beagle" , by which it is now best known. While the expedition was originally planned to last two years, it lasted almost five—the Beagle did not return until 2 October Darwin spent most of this time exploring on land three years and three months on land; 18 months at sea. The book is a vivid travel memoir as well as a detailed scientific field journal covering biology , geology, and anthropology that demonstrates Darwin's keen powers of observation, written at a time when Western Europeans were exploring and charting the whole world.

Darwin's Observations

Although Darwin revisited some areas during the expedition, for clarity the chapters of the book are ordered by reference to places and locations rather than by date. Darwin's notes made during the voyage include comments hinting at his changing views on the fixity of species. On his return, he wrote the book based on these notes, at a time when he was first developing his theories of evolution through common descent and natural selection.

The book includes some suggestions of his ideas, particularly in the second edition of Darwin was invited by FitzRoy to contribute the natural history section to the captain's account of the Beagle's voyage. Using his field notes and the journal which he had been sending home for his family to read, he completed this section by September FitzRoy had to edit the notes of the previous captain of the Beagle, as well as write his own account of the voyage and the previous expeditions of two ships.

Darwin's Journal and Remarks, — forms the third volume, and the fourth volume is a lengthy appendix.