William Swale, a prominent nurseryman in New Zealand, writes to Darwin to discuss the absence of a native bee in New Zealand. His letter included four bee specimens labeled ‘Naturalised Bee’. Shown in three formats; the original letter (scanned), a…
The author cites Darwin’s use of Latin in a footnote on p.13 of Descent, vol. 1 which veiled a statement on baboons’ sexual attraction to human females. Here, the author not only translates elements of the Latin into English but also provides an…
The author reassures his audience that he has dealt with his subject matter with great delicacy and therefore, unlike Darwin, not found it necessary “to cloak any part of [the] lecture in the obscurity of a learned language”.
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.