Epilogue

The preceding pages have provided vivid word-portraits of the four personalities who, more than any others, helped to create an intellectual environment for Charles Darwin’s thoughts; Erasmus Darwin and Malthus by their writings, Lyell and Hooker through constant personal association and correspondence. It was the world’s good fortune that Charles’s material circumstances gave him the freedom to follow his natural bent and to profit by the conditions he inherited and to develop those personal attachments to which he acknowledged his indebtedness. Also that his great vigour was of the mind rather than of the body, since a more physically robust individual with his predilections, might well have been irresistibly tempted to dissipate his energies in further travels, to collect specimens and information such as he often invoked the help of his many correspondents to acquire. In fact the ill health he endured after the voyage of the Beagle, if more psychological than physical, encouraged the conditions for reflexion upon the data he accumulated and which he employed to such good effect. Recent investigations have given increasing realism to the concept of D.N.A. functioning as a macromolecular template for the hereditary mechanism and the possibility that this could be directedly modified by the environment in special conditions would appear to have become a probability, with respect to bacteria in changed chemical surroundings, from the researches of Hinshelwood and his associates

Aesthetics · Art history · Epistemology · Erasmus · Political science · Portrait · Realism · Sociology · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · History of Science and Medicine · History of Science and Natural History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology