For Private Distribution. The following pages contains extracts from Letters addressed to Professor Henslow by C. Darwin, Esq. They are printed for distribution among the members of the Cambridge Philosophical Society .

DARWIN, Charles

Published by [the University Press for the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Cambridge, 1835

About this Item

The Pamphlet that Made Darwin's Reputation before He Knew It Existed. First edition, very rare, of Darwin's first separately printed work - the thirty-one-page pamphlet in which John Stevens Henslow, Cambridge Regius Professor of Botany, Darwin's mentor and the man who had secured him his berth on the Beagle, printed selected passages from Darwin's letters home for private distribution to the Fellows of the Cambridge Philosophical Society on 1 December 1835. Darwin was then in the South Pacific, had just called at Tahiti, and would not learn for almost half a year that the pamphlet existed. He did not see a copy until October 1836, when he was back in England. In those intervening months the pamphlet circulated rapidly through the British geological establishment, and the verdict was already being returned. This is the document by which the public naturalist of the following quarter-century was first introduced to the scientific community - twenty-four years before the Origin of Species, thirty-six before the Descent of Man, and a career before the books which would carry his name around the world. It is his first separately printed work and the first of the ninety-five entries in Freeman's bibliography. The pamphlet was the printed form of extracts that had already been read aloud. On 16 November 1835, at the Cambridge Philosophical Society's meeting chaired by the president, the Rev. Dr William Clark, Henslow read extracts from ten of Darwin's letters from South America, with remarks contributed by Adam Sedgwick. Two days later, at the Geological Society of London in Somerset House, Sedgwick read further extracts and introduced them as a very great mass of information connected with almost every branch of natural history - from which he would for the present occasion confine himself to the geology. The Athenaeum summarised the Geological Society session in its number of 21 November, and by Caroline Darwin's transcription of that report Sedgwick had given specific notice of her brother's observations on the tertiary formation of Patagonia & Chili & on the changes of level between land & sea, and of the description of the Uspallata Pass with its tertiary and igneous alternations and its veins of true granite, gold, and other metals. Charles Lyell, then serving his first term as President of the Geological Society (1835-1837), was in the audience for this reading; so was Henslow's friend Leonard Jenyns, the Cambridgeshire naturalist who had himself been offered and declined the Beagle berth four years earlier. By the time the Beagle docked at Falmouth in early October 1836, Darwin's scientific reputation in Britain had been made in his absence. Henslow was then thirty-nine, a Regius Professor of Botany who had previously held the chair of mineralogy, and was in several respects the architect of Cambridge natural science in the 1830s: he had been a founder of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1819, had taught the botany course that Darwin took at Christ's College for three years running, had conducted the Saturday field excursions at which Darwin had done most of his undergraduate natural-history apprenticeship, and had presided over the Friday Evening scientific soirées in his own drawing-room at which Darwin as an undergraduate met Sedgwick, Whewell, Peacock, and the senior figures of the University's scientific community. Darwin himself, in the Autobiography of 1876, described the friendship with Henslow as the circumstance that had influenced his whole career more than any other, and remembered being called by some of the dons "the man who walks with Henslow." When in August 1831 the Beaufort-Peacock-FitzRoy search for a gentleman naturalist to sail on the Beagle reached Henslow's desk - Peacock writing from Cambridge on behalf of his friend Francis Beaufort, Hydrographer of the Navy - Henslow first considered going himself, declined on account of his wife and family, and, having first offered and been declined by Leona.

Seller Inventory # 6395

Bibliographic Details

• Title: For Private Distribution. The following pages contains extracts from Letters addressed to Professor Henslow by C. Darwin, Esq. They are printed for distribution among the members of the Cambridge Philosophical Society .
• Publisher: [the University Press for the Cambridge Philosophical Society, Cambridge
• Publication Date: 1835
• Edition: First edition.
• Signed: Signed
• Seller catalogs:
  • Natural History, Geology
  • Chemistry, Medicine, Biology