The Foundations of the Origin of Species. Darwin Charles

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СКАЧАТЬ continuous text. A certain amount of repetition is unavoidable, but much of what is written on the backs of the pages is of too much interest to be omitted. Some of the matter here given in footnotes may, moreover, have been intended as the final text and not as the preliminary sketch.

      When a word cannot be deciphered, it is replaced by: – «illegible», the angular brackets being, as already explained, a symbol for an insertion by the editor. More commonly, however, the context makes the interpretation of a word reasonably sure although the word is not strictly legible. Such words are followed by an inserted mark of interrogation «?». Lastly, words inserted by the editor, of which the appropriateness is doubtful, are printed thus «variation?».

      Two kinds of erasure occur in the MS. of 1842. One by vertical lines which seem to have been made when the 35 pp. MS. was being expanded into that of 1844, and merely imply that such a page is done with: and secondly the ordinary erasures by horizontal lines. I have not been quite consistent in regard to these: I began with the intention of printing (in square brackets) all such erasures. But I ultimately found that the confusion introduced into the already obscure sentences was greater than any possible gain; and many such erasures are altogether omitted. In the same way I have occasionally omitted hopelessly obscure and incomprehensible fragments, which if printed would only have burthened the text with a string of «illegible»s and queried words. Nor have I printed the whole of what is written on the backs of the pages, where it seemed to me that nothing but unnecessary repetition would have been the result.

      In the matter of punctuation I have given myself a free hand. I may no doubt have misinterpreted the author's meaning in so doing, but without such punctuation, the number of repellantly crabbed sentences would have been even greater than at present. In dealing with the Essay of 1844, I have corrected some obvious slips without indicating such alterations, because the MS. being legible, there is no danger of changing the author's meaning.

      The sections into which the Essay of 1842 is divided are in the original merely indicated by a gap in the MS. or by a line drawn across the page. No titles are given except in the case of § VIII.; and § II. is the only section which has a number in the original. I might equally well have made sections of what are now subsections, e. g. Natural Selection p. 7, or Extermination p. 28. But since the present sketch is the germ of the Essay of 1844, it seemed best to preserve the identity between the two works, by using such of the author's divisions as correspond to the chapters of the enlarged version of 1844. The geological discussion with which Part II begins corresponds to two chapters (IV and V) of the 1844 Essay. I have therefore described it as §§ IV. and V., although I cannot make sure of its having originally consisted of two sections. With this exception the ten sections of the Essay of 1842 correspond to the ten chapters of that of 1844.

      The Origin of Species differs from the sketch of 1842 in not being divided into two parts. But the two volumes resemble each other in general structure. Both begin with a statement of what may be called the mechanism of evolution, – variation and selection: in both the argument proceeds from the study of domestic organisms to that of animals and plants in a state of nature. This is followed in both by a discussion of the Difficulties on Theory and this by a section Instinct which in both cases is treated as a special case of difficulty.

      If I had to divide the Origin (first edition) into two parts without any knowledge of earlier MS., I should, I think, make Part II begin with Ch. VI, Difficulties on Theory. A possible reason why this part of the argument is given in Part I of the Essay of 1842 may be found in the Essay of 1844, where it is clear that the chapter on instinct is placed in Part I because the author thought it of importance to show that heredity and variation occur in mental attributes. The whole question is perhaps an instance of the sort of difficulty which made the author give up the division of his argument into two Parts when he wrote the Origin. As matters stand §§ IV. and V. of the 1842 Essay correspond to the geological chapters, IX and X, in the Origin. From this point onwards the material is grouped in the same order in both works: geographical distribution; affinities and classification; unity of type and morphology; abortive or rudimentary organs; recapitulation and conclusion.

      In enlarging the Essay of 1842 into that of 1844, the author retained the sections of the sketch as chapters in the completer presentment. It follows that what has been said of the relation of the earlier Essay to the Origin is generally true of the 1844 Essay. In the latter, however, the geological discussion is, clearly instead of obscurely, divided into two chapters, which correspond roughly with Chapters IX and X of the Origin. But part of the contents of Chapter X (Origin) occurs in Chapter VI (1844) on Geographical Distribution. The treatment of distribution is particularly full and interesting in the 1844 Essay, but the arrangement of the material, especially the introduction of § III. p. 183, leads to some repetition which is avoided in the Origin. It should be noted that Hybridism, which has a separate chapter (VIII) in the Origin, is treated in Chapter II of the Essay. Finally that Chapter XIII (Origin) corresponds to Chapters VII, VIII and IX of the work of 1844.

      The fact that in 1842, seventeen years before the publication of the Origin, my father should have been able to write out so full an outline of his future work, is very remarkable. In his Autobiography25 he writes of the 1844 Essay, “But at that time I overlooked one problem of great importance… This problem is the tendency in organic beings descended from the same stock to diverge in character as they become modified.” The absence of the principle of divergence is of course also a characteristic of the sketch of 1842. But at p. 37, the author is not far from this point of view. The passage referred to is: “If any species, A, in changing gets an advantage and that advantage … is inherited, A will be the progenitor of several genera or even families in the hard struggle of nature. A will go on beating out other forms, it might come that A would people «the» earth, – we may now not have one descendant on our globe of the one or several original creations26.” But if the descendants of A have peopled the earth by beating out other forms, they must have diverged in occupying the innumerable diverse modes of life from which they expelled their predecessors. What I wrote27 on this subject in 1887 is I think true: “Descent with modification implies divergence, and we become so habituated to a belief in descent, and therefore in divergence, that we do not notice the absence of proof that divergence is in itself an advantage.”

      The fact that there is no set discussion on the principle of divergence in the 1844 Essay, makes it clear why the joint paper read before the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858, included a letter28 to Asa Gray, as well as an extract29 from the Essay of 1844. It is clearly because the letter to Gray includes a discussion on divergence, and was thus, probably, the only document, including this subject, which could be appropriately made use of. It shows once more how great was the importance attached by its author to the principle of divergence.

      I have spoken of the hurried and condensed manner in which the sketch of 1842 is written; the style of the later Essay (1844) is more finished. It has, however, the air of an uncorrected MS. rather than of a book which has gone through the ordeal of proof sheets. It has not all the force and conciseness of the Origin, but it has a certain freshness which gives it a character of its own. It must be remembered that the Origin was an abstract or condensation of a much bigger book, whereas the Essay of 1844 was an expansion of the sketch of 1842. It is not therefore surprising that in the Origin there is occasionally evident a chafing against the author's self-imposed limitation. Whereas in the 1844 Essay there is an air of freedom, as if the author were letting himself go, rather than applying the curb. This quality of freshness and the fact that some questions were more fully discussed in 1844 than in 1859, makes the earlier work good reading even to those who are familiar with the Origin.

      The writing of this Essay “during the summer of 1844,” as stated in the AutobiographyСКАЧАТЬ