Browse Items (68 total)

Andrew Smith, an army surgeon stationed in South Africa, discusses Khoisan or ‘Hottentot’ notions of beauty in women; in particular their preference for women with large posteriors and lengthened ‘Nymphae’ (inner labia). Too sensitive for a general…

Darwin writes to Zoologist George Robert Gray asking him to proof read his Latin in the Birds section of The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle (1839).

Darwin asks his son, Francis, and his Cambridge University friends to check his Latin. Latin was not Darwin's strong point and he frequently relied on his sons and colleagues to check his efforts (see letter to George Robert Gray, below).

The…

Like all of Darwin’s children, Francis helped his father from a young age. As a child he and his siblings made observations and collected plant samples. Later in life Francis, classically-educated in Latin, proved a useful source of help for Darwin’s…

The final version of the passage in which Darwin used a cleansed, polite discourse to describe a courtship process which better reflected Victorian notions of modest, passive femininity and sexually-driven, active masculinity.

Darwin queries which part of his manuscript Murray considered “coarse”, confirming in the process that a section on female sexual desire was not his work but a quote from John Hunter’s Essays and Observations on Natural History (1861).

Murray suggests that Darwin tone down a passage on the delicate subject of female sexual desire.

Darwin had included the word ‘sexual’ in the title of an earlier draft of Descent: Murray was relieved when it was omitted.