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The origin and rapid diversification of flowering plants is a long-standing “abominable mystery”, as Charles Darwin put it. Part of the puzzle – the origin of the protective covering of flowering-plant seeds – is nearing resolution. Fossil evidence sheds light on the origin of the second integument.

Do new anatomical structures arise de novo, or do they evolve from pre-existing structures? Advances in developmental genetics, palaeontology and evolutionary developmental biology have recently shed light on the origins of some of the structures that most intrigued Charles Darwin, including animal eyes, tetrapod limbs and giant beetle horns. In each case, structures arose by the modification of pre-existing genetic regulatory circuits established in early metazoans. The deep homology of generative processes and cell-type specification mechanisms in animal development has provided the foundation for the independent evolution of a great variety of structures.

How a herbarium helped to lay the foundations of evolutionary thinking. John Stevens Henslow has an important place in the history of science as the man who recommended Charles Darwin as a substitute when the naturalist's berth fell vacant aboard HMS Beagle. But he was more than a glorified travel agent. He has been credited with stimulating Darwin's interest in geology, and now analysis of Henslow's herbarium suggests that his approach to the classification of the species was an important contribution to the foundation of evolutionary thinking.

Henry Nicholls wonders how things would be different had Charles Darwin given in to pressure from his publisher to rewrite Origin of Species into a popular book about pigeons.

Anniversaries of Charles Darwin's life and work have been used to rewrite and re-energize his theory of natural selection. Janet Browne tracks a century of Darwinian celebrations.

Darwin is the latest eminent scientist to get an online archive. How do these undertakings change our understanding of history, asks Henry Nicholls. This week the complete works of Charles Darwin go live — for free — on http://darwin-online.org.uk . This landmark has been achieved before for other scientific luminaries of the past. We ask how it has influenced their scientific reputations, and whether we will see similar resources devoted to the enormous amounts of material generated by modernday scientists.

Can reading the classics through Charles Darwin's spectacles reawaken literary study? John Whitfield reports.

Baba Brinkman is a Canadian rap artist whose award-winning show The Rap Guide to Evolution wowed UK crowds at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival during Charles Darwin's bicentenary year. As the show opens next week for a long summer run off Broadway in New York, Brinkman discusses rhyme, improvisation and scientific certainty.

Nicky Clayton, a biologist and psychologist who studies the behaviour of birds, and who is also a salsa and tango dancer, collaborated with Rambert Dance Company to create a work commemorating Charles Darwin. As The Comedy of Change tours the United Kingdom, she explains how communicating via motion is common to both dance and the natural world.

Charles Darwin called the origin of the flowering plants (or angiosperms) an ‘abominable mystery’. The enigma is still far from complete resolution, but some headway is made with the discovery of a new type of embryo sac (a female reproductive structure) in Amborella trichopoda, a small evergreen shrub now found only on the island of New Caledonia. Amborella is the sole living representative of the most ancient angiosperm lineage, and a true ‘living fossil’. Its embryo sac sheds light on a period of experimentation in the early evolution of the flowering plants, and may represent a key intermediate condition between gymnosperms and angiosperms.

Charles Darwin: Voyaging, Volume 1 of a Biography. By Janet Browne. Knopf/Cape: 1995. Pp. 606. $35, £25.

Forced to flee by angry fishermen protesting against lobster quotas, staff at the Charles Darwin Research Station in the Galapagos Islands spent a night late last month cowering in a mangrove thicket, until they were rescued by the Ecuadorian navy.

One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Evolutionary Thought. By Ernst Mayr. Harvard University Press: 1991. Pp. 187. $19.95. (To be published in Europe by Viking on 30 January 1992. £17.99).

london A UK group has been set up to raise funds to restore the neglected grave of Alfred Russel Wallace, who discovered natural evolution independently of Charles Darwin.

Charles Darwin. A New Biography. By John Bowlby. Hutchinson: 1990. Pp. 511. £19.95, $24.95.

At sales in London (11 November) and New York (29 October), some significant scientific items will be on offer. Lots at the London event include works of art by renowned natural history illustrators of the past, as well as a signed photograph of Charles Darwin. The New York auction is of the only remaining copy, dating to the tenth century, of the text on which accounts of Archimedes' ideas are based.

Charles Darwin might never have formulated his theory of natural selection had a passion for collecting beetles, among other things, not diverted him from his clerical studies. The diverse colours and structures of beetles still fascinate today, and one study has now looked at how two particular beetles get their bright colourings. It turns out that the structures that reflect light and produce the colour are very different, allowing these two beetles to be respectively camouflaged and conspicuous.

The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. Volume 6 1856–1857. Edited by F. Burkhardt and S Smith. Cambridge University Press: 1990. Pp. 673. £35, $49.50.

IN bringing together the series of essays composing this volume, the Cambridge Philosophical Society, the syndics of the University Press, and the editor of the work, Prof. Seward, have rendered a public service for which all those who cultivate science in any of its numerous branches must be deeply grateful. It is an appropriate international memorial raised at a most opportune time in memory of the centenary of the birth of our greatest naturalist, and in celebration of the jubilee of the publication of that epoch-making book which made the principle of organic evolution a living reality in the strictest scientific sense. We have now been provided with a symposium of twenty-eight essays by English and foreign experts—every name being that of a recognised authority in that subject with which he deals. It is no exaggeration to speak of this work as monumental; it is a monument of greater durability than bronze or marble, because it stereotypes the collective thought of our age. For the future historian of science it must for all time serve as a land-mark indicating the present stage of development of scientific doctrine in every department of human thought where science holds sway, and where the great principle of evolution has, under Darwin's influence, served as a guide in the interpretation both of organic and inorganic nature. Darwin and Modern Science. Essays in Commemoration of the Centenary of the Birth of Charles Darwin and of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Publication of the “Origin of Species.” Edited for the Cambridge Philosophical Society and the Syndics of the University Press by Prof. A. C. Seward. Pp. xvii + 595. (Cambridge: University Press, 1909.) Price 18s. net.

IN the present volume Mr. Romanes redeems a part of the promise which he gave us in his “Animal Intelligence.” He traces in its main outlines the development of mind in the lower animals. The other part of the promise, to follow the course of mental development in man, will be fulfilled in another work. We think it well that the author has thus divided his task. Each division is of sufficient magnitude to require a separate volume; and though as an evolutionist Mr. Romanes would of course maintain the continuity and identity of the process of mental evolution from its first obscure manifestations in the lower grades of animals up to its highest present point of attainment in civilised man, he would probably allow that the two stages of the process, the sub-human and the human, are sufficiently differenced by the difference in the degree of complexity of the factors involved. To this it may be added that the detailed study of each of these two stages of mental life requires a body of knowledge of its own, a special modification of psychological method, and a particular kind of psychological interest. Mental Evolution in Animals. By G. J. Romanes, &c. With a Posthumous Essay on Instinct, by Charles Darwin. (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1883.)

FEW as are the students of vegetable physiology in this country, it is very far from a mere boast to say that, with Mr. Darwin's aid, we have no reason to shrink from comparing English work in this subject with that done abroad. Mr. Darwin has sometimes lamented that he is not a botanist, yet it would be difficult to name any scientific man with an accepted claim to that description who could point to more valuable botanical work than his studies of heterostyled plants, the fertilisation of orchids, and the habits of climbing and insectivorous plants. As to the present volume, there is no risk whatever in stating that it at once takes and will always retain a classical position in botanical literature and when one considers that these are not the only things which have come during late years from the same apparently inexhaustible treasury, and when one remembers also that the great student who has filled it has throughout struggled with difficulties which would have effectually quenched the energy of most men, one may allow oneself to wonder whether Mr. Darwin's own scientific activity is not itself a more than remarkable biological problem. The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom. By Charles Darwin, &c. (London: John Murray, 1876.)

I HAVE had the privilege of reading a series of messages cabled by Mikhail Petrov to the president of the Linnean Society in which a description is given of an exhibition now displayed in the Zoological Museum, Moscow, to illustrate phases in the life and work of Charles Darwin. The exhibition, which has been organized by Prof. Turov, director of the Museum, and his staff, is on a scale beyond anything ever attempted in Great Britain or in any other country ; in the words of M. Petrov, it “symbolizes the ever-growing cultural relations of two friendly nations who are united in a struggle against Nazi barbarism”.

THE National Physical Laboratory of India, the foundation-stone of which was laid at Delhi on January 4, 1947, by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in the presence of a distinguished gathering of Indian and foreign men of science, including Sir Charles Darwin, director of the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, and Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Astronomer

ON November 24, 1859, appeared the first edition of that immortal work—the outcome of twenty years' research—which was destined to revolutionise scientific thought, first in the domain of organic nature, and ultimately in every department of intellectual activity. The celebrations of the jubilee of this publication and of the centenary of the birth of its illustrious author, held at Baltimore in January, at Oxford in February, and at Cambridge in June of the present year, have been the means of directing public attention in such detail and in such forcible terms to the magnitude of Darwin's achievements and to the far-reaching consequences of his labours that it may well be doubted whether any further tribute can be paid to the memory of our great countryman. Nevertheless, on the present occasion, practically coincident with the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the “Origin,” it is only appropriate that we should direct attention in these columns to the latest contribution to Darwinian literature, the above work by Prof. Poulton, which the author has happily contrived to issue on the exact date of the anniversary. The readers of NATURE may be reminded that in these pages, to which Darwin himself was a rare contributor, some of the greatest questions raised by the publication of the “Origin” have been fought out by the leaders of science in that field of natural knowledge which, at the touch of what Helmholtz designated the “new creative thought,” became reduced from a state of chaos to one of scientific order. Charles Darwin and the Origin of Species; Addresses, &c., in America and England in the Year of the Two Anniversaries. By Prof. E. B. Poulton, Pp. xvi + 280 and index. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909.)

IT was Darwin himself who, looking back on his life, wrote in his autobiography, “The voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life, and has determined my whole career” ; and there can be no doubt that he was right. Thus every additional gleam of light on this period of his life is bound to be of interest.

SINCE Charles Darwin's great work of 1859, various facets of the biological armament race between predator and prey have been studied in depth, as in the work of Blest1, Cott2, Darwin3 and De Ruiter4. These studies describe and analyse regular, predictable structure/behaviour complexes, such as camouflage, mimicry and various fleeing mechanisms.

Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation. By Neal C. Gillespie. Pp.224. (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1979.) £11.55.

Charles Darwin, Anton Dohrn: Correspondence. Edited By Christiane Groeben. Pp.118. (Gaetano Macchiaroli Editore, via Carducci 59, 80121 Naples: 1982.) L7,000.

The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Vol. 2 1837–1843. Edited by Frederick Burkhardt andSydney Smith. Cambridge University Press:1987. Pp.603. £30, $37.50. The Darwinian Heritage. Edited by David Kohn. Princeton University Press: 1986. Pp.1,138. $95, £63.40.

Charles Darwin: A Man of Enlarged Curiosity. ByPeter Brent. Pp.536. ISBN UK 0-434-08595-2; ISBN US 0-16-014880-2. (Heinemann, London/Harper & Row, New York: 1981.) 12.50, 20.75.

HAROLD PENILE son of the Rev. John Peake, vicar of Ellesmere, was born on September 29, 1867, and died an September 22, 1946, at his home at Boxford near Newbury. He belonged to the characteristically British tradition of the man of leisure who without professional commitments, devotes himself to intellectual and public work. One thinks of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, among others, in this connexion. An early training at Leicester for estate management gave Peake insight into problems of land tenure and land use on a historical basis, and resulted later on in a valuable study of old roads (published in “Memorials of Old Leicestershire”). In 1897 he married Miss Charlotte Bayliff and they went round the world, staying some time on a ranch in British Columbia, from the life of which Peake gained clues, to his later interpretations of pastoralism in prehistoric times.

[MR. CHARLES DARWIN has kindly sent us for publication the following letter, addressed to him by Herr Fritz Muller, the well-known naturalist, brother of our contributor, Dr. Hermann Muller, and who has for so long been devoting himself to natural history researches in Brazil.]

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals By Charles Darwin. Pp. xi + 372 + 15 plates. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955.) 6 dollars.

WE close most biographies with the exclamation “too long and far too many letters,” but the three volumes of the “Life and Letters of Charles Darwin,” published in 1887, left their readers, like young Oliver Twist, “asking for more.” At that time considerations of space and other reasons prevented the editors from publishing numerous letters in their possession, and since then many of great interest have been received. From this unused material they have compiled, with only a few slight repetitions, “an almost complete record of Darwin's work,” which will be welcomed, we are sure, not only by students of science, but also by all interested in the history of the Earth and Man. It is now nearly forty-four years since the “Origin of Species” was first published. The book was received with objurgation by the many, with praise by the few, yet in about half that time it had forced its way to a front place among the classics of scientific literature, and though opinions still differ about the prime factor in producing a species, a place is assured to Charles Darwin among naturalists similar to that of Isaac Newton among physical mathematicians. The former, indeed, has effected, outside his own field, an even more rapid and extensive transformation of thought. The idea of evolution has acted like a solvent in subjects to which it might have been supposed alien, for it has even won recognition from theology, by the partisans of which it was at first so vociferously and ignorantly assailed. It has, in short, succeeded in revealing the “How” of the natural order, though making no pretence of fathoming the mystery of the “Why.” More Letters of Charles Darwin. A Record of his Work in a Series of hitherto Unpublished Letters. Edited by Francis Darwin, Fellow of Christ's College, and A. L. Seward, Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In two volumes, illustrated. Vol. L, pp. xxiv + 494; vol. ii., pp. viii + 508. (London: J. Murray, 1903.) Price 32s. net.

Evolution by Natural Selection By Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Pp. viii + 288. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1958. Published for the XV International Congress of Zoology and the Linnean Society of London.) 25s. net. Darwin's Century Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It. By Prof. Loren Eiseley., Pp. xvii + 378. (New York: Double-day and Company, Inc., 1958.) 5 dollars. A Century of Darwin Edited by S. A. Barnett., Pp. xvi + 376 + 5 plates. (London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1958.) 30s. net. Embryos and Ancestors By Sir Gavin de Beer. Third edition. Pp. xii + 197. (Oxford: Clarendon Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1958.) 25s. net.

FEW are the writers, scientific or otherwise, who ca afford, in every successive edition of their works, to place side by side the passages which they have seen reason to alter, from a change of view or any other cause. And yet to this point we find especial attention called in each succeeding edition of Mr. Darwin's “Origin of Species.” And herein lies the true humility of the man of science. Science is often charged with being arrogant. But the true student of Nature cannot be otherwise than humble-minded. That man is unworthy of the name of a man of science who, whatever may be his special branch of study, has not materially altered his views on some important points within the last twelve years.* The means at our command for obtaining correct views of the laws which govern Nature are ever increasing, and if we only The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection; or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. By Charles Darwin, M.A., F.R.S. Sixth edition, with additions and corrections. (London: J. Murray, 1872.)

THE author has evidently spent much time and labour in writing this life of Charles Darwin and presenting it in a moderate-sized volume of 351 pages, printed in a type pleasant to read, with eight illustrations, including three of Darwin (in 1840, 1854 and 1881), one of his wife and three of his ancestors. The list of "works quoted or otherwise utilised"on pages 333-342 is an indication of the ground which was traversed in its preparation, with the fruitful results shown in the excellent choice of significant passages for quotation. Charles Darwin, the Fragmentary Man By Geoffrey West. Pp. xiii + 351 + 8 plates. (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1937.) 15s. net.

Charles Darwin: A Companion. By R. B. Freeman. Pp. 309. (Dawson: Folkestone, UK; Archon Books/Shoe String Press: Hamden, Connecticut, 1979.) £12.50; $27.50.

The Collected Papers of Charles Darwin. (2 Volumes.) Edited by Paul H. Barrett, with a Foreword by Theodosius Dobzhansky. Pp. viii + 277 + 326. (University of Chicago: Chicago and London, 1977.) £27.30; $40 the set.

Charles Darwin. By L.R. Stevens. Pp.159. (Twayne Publishers/G.K. Hall: Boston, 1979.) $8.95.

The Great Dying: Cosmic Catastrophe, Dinosaurs, and the Theory of Evolution. By Kenneth J. Hsu. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1987. Pp.292. $17.95, £15.60.

CHARLES DARWIN wrote several letters to William Benjamin Carpenter, five of which have been published in the “Life and Letters”. The original MSS., eight in number, came to me on the death of my uncle, Joseph Estlin Carpenter, the last surviving son of William Benjamin, and I have presented them to Down House for preservation by the British Association.

I send herewith a copy of a letter to the late Lord Farrer from my father, Charles Darwin. So far as I can ascertain, it has never been published. It was evidently dictated, probably in the afternoon when tired by his morning's work. His remarks on observation and reasoning seem to me to be of especial interest. A letter on the same subject, definitely admitting his error, is given in “More Letters” vol. 2, p. 373.

On the Origin of Species By Charles Darwin. Facsimile of the First Edition with an Introduction by Ernst Mayr. Pp. xxvii + ix + 502. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1964.) 48s. net.

Charles Darwin: The Years of Controversy—The Origin of Species and its Critics, 1859–82. By Peter J. Vorzimmer. Pp. xix + 300. (University of London: London, 1972.) £4.40.

HAVING had occasion last year to allude as a fact to the circumstance that Charles Darwin assumed mankind to have arisen at one place, and therefore in a single pair, I was surprised to find that this fact was doubted, or at least very doubtfully accepted, by some of my scientific friends; and I was asked for a reference to his works in confirmation of it. My principal reliance, however, was in the recollection of a private letter to myself from the illustrious naturalist, which I had unfortunately mislaid. Having now recovered this letter, I send a copy of it to NATURE for publication, simply explaining that this letter was in reply to a letter from me in which I put the direct question, why it was that he did assume the unity of mankind as descended from a single pair? It will be observed that in his reply he does not repudiate this interpretation of his theory, but simply proceeds to explain and to defend the doctrine.

IT is well known that Charles Darwin began to advocate his famous doctrine of evolution after his voyage on board H.M.S. Beagle as naturalist, in the course of which he went to South America, Africa, and Oceania, and founded the theory of natural selection; but it has been a matter of regret among men of science throughout the world that the famous old ship had passed out of sight. As the result of careful inquiries, however, by Mr. Shigetaka Shiga, a renowned geographer in Japan, it has now been ascertained what was the ultimate fate of the Beagle.

THE reviewer of Osborn's “From the Greeks to Darwin” (antea p. 362) says that Marshall quotes the fact of Wallace's being led “to the discovery of natural selection as he lay ill of intermittent fever at Ternate,” and refers one to the abridged form of the “Life and Letters of Charles Darwin” for this statement. Having only the original edition in three volumes, from the year 1887, at my disposal, wherein I cannot find it, I would draw attention to my having published the fact as far back as 1870 (“Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Ihre ersten Publicationen uber die Entstehung der Arten, nebst einer Skizze ihres Lebens und einem Verzeichniss ihrer Schriften.” Erlangen, E. Besold, 8vo, pp. xxiii. and 56, on page xviii.) The remarks to be found there are based upon a letter of Mr. Wallace's dated November 22, 1869, and now before me, a passage of which runs thus:—