charles_darwin

Primary Documents Relating to Darwin and Darwinism
2. Fuller’s teasel is a weedlike plant found all over the United States
but native to Europe. It has lavender flowers with four petals arranged in
an egglike shape. Both the stem and the flower have hooked barbs. The
head of all plants in the Dipsacaceae family looks like a pin cushion.
3. A terrierlike dog used in the nineteenth century to turn the wheel,
which turned a spit over a fire, hence the name. The breed is now extinct.
4. A sheep with short, crooked legs and a long back. First ‘‘discovered’’
in Massachusetts in 1791, the legs and back are probably a genetic
deformity.
5. Thomas Vernon Wollaston (1822–1878) was a British naturalist
who wrote several books on the insects and shells of the Azores, Madeiran,
and Canary Islands.
6. Malthus argued that freer access to marriage (and the concomitant
possibility of having more children) was a significant factor in the increase
in the human population.
7. Swedish naturalist (1707–1778).
8. ‘‘Art’’ here means ‘‘artificial’’ or ‘‘created by man’’ in contrast to
something natural or created by nature.
9. Polymorphic means ‘‘many forms.’’ See Glossary of Selected Terms.
10. Darwin is probably quoting William Marshall (1745–1818), a British
agriculturist, whose book The Rural Economy of Yorkshire (1788) described
the origins of cattle breeds in that county.
11. See The Origin of Species, 12, 13, 167, 198.
12. A nineteenth-century term for abnormalities. A monstrosity was
any species that possessed a structure or organ with a substantial and visible
deviation from the norm.
13. Nineteenth-century gardeners used the term ‘‘sporting plants’’
when a bud appeared on a plant that was different from the other buds. See
The Origin of Species, 9–10.
14. Sir John Avery Lubbock (1834–1913), English banker, politician,
and scientist. The quotation is from Pre-Historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient
Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages, 2nd edition
(London: Williams and Norgate, 1869), 571.
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