JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
I found a very interesting and unexpected bit in the always-fascinating Scientific American Supplement for August 25, 1877. In the middle of the weekly issue, following a James Croll article on the age of the sun and a William Thomson piece of the age of the Earth, and just pages away from a semi-famous illustrated piece by A.M. Worthington on his observations of liquid splashes, came a long and densely-printed contribution by Charles Darwin, "A Biographical Sketch of an Infant". This first appeared a month earlier in Mind, and printed in nine pages--the Scientific American version is printed on two, as I show below. I find this remarkable, in a way, that the SA would do such a thing and be successful with it, fitting in as much info as possible in the least amount of space.
{Image very expandable.]
In any event, the article by Darwin is pretty interesting, and the experimentalist/clinical observer in him was applied to watching the first months of the birth of his first son (William Erasmus Darwin, 1839-1914). I found at the superb Darwin-Online website a reference to Darwin's activities and the birth of William in his Autobiography: "My first child was born on December 27th, 1839, and I at once commenced to make notes on the first dawn of the various expressions which he exhibited, for I felt convinced, even at this early period, that the most complex and fine shades of expression must all have had a gradual and natural origin." And indeed he does, establishing in his second sentence "I had excellent opportunities for close observation, and wrote down at once whatever was observed". Darwin certainly would have had a chance for a observation as the subject's father, but I am sure that he was being clinical/professional about the whole undertaking, and so the understatement.
I include my own version of the Darwin paper (below) as well as a link to the OCRd version from the Mind original from the Darwin-Online website:
- http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=1&itemID=F1779&viewtype=text
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