Library Insight: Theology vs Geology

A new Insight this week will focus on Victorian faith and science during a period when new discoveries challenged biblical accounts of how the world came to be.

Theology Vs Geology will be held on Thursday 23rd February, 6-7pm and is presented by Senior Archivist Dr Chris Hilton.

Our popular Insight sessions offer visitors to the Wellcome Library an opportunity to explore the variety of our holdings. These free sessions are thematic in style, last around an hour and offer a chance to learn about our collections.

For further details and booking, please follow the links above to the appropriate pages on the Wellcome Collection website.

'Monkeyana' and the book that never was

As we come to the close of the year, 2011 saw not one but two films concerned with attitudes to our ancestors - Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Project Nim. Fiction, as well as legislation, has a long history of interest in interspecies relations and the Library contains some classic examples, including The Island of Dr Moreau and Tarzan. Many of these works show the influence of Charles Darwin's notion of evolution and importantly its antithesis - devolution or degeneration.

If humans had developed from apes could some of us occasionally revert to our primitive former selves? This theme lies behind such titles as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (see previous post) and The Time Machine. More recently, films of the 20th century continued to refer to the idea of reverting to a more bestial type (atavism), including Cat People which I have to confess, is one of my favourite movies. The original, by Jacques Tourneur, features a quote in its opening sequence from 'The Anatomy of Atavism' by Dr L. Judd:

Even as fog continues to lie in the valleys, so does ancient sin cling to the low places, the depressions in the world consciousness.

Alas, any search for this intriguing tome will prove fruitless as it, like Dr Judd, the psychiatrist in the film, never existed. Judd, played by Tom Conway lives on in film history because with his pipe, cigarettes and urbane charm he is a great example of early filmic portrayals of this profession. Here are two film clips: one from Cat People in which Judd archly smokes at a wedding party, and this trailer for the sequel Curse of the Cat People which has a Christmas theme (albeit one with threats of infanticide).

Film fans may appreciate our new e-book Icons of Grief (available to registered readers) which examines the work of Val Lewton, writer of both Cat People and the equally wonderful 'I Walked with a Zombie' (a re-working of Jane Eyre set on a tropical island). Lewton was a Russian emigree and the nephew of Hollywood star Alla Nazimova who allegedly coined the term 'sewing circle' to describe the clandestine affairs of tinsel town's bisexual and lesbian actresses.


For books that do exist concerning current legislation readers can see Marie Fox's chapter 'Legislating Interspecies Embryos' inside our new acquisition The Legal, Medical and Cultural Regulation of the Body. Fox highlights how tricky it is coining the right term to express what many consider a contestable area of research: mixing the cells or gametes of human and non-human animals. Terms like 'chimera' and 'hybrid' are often used by journalists and authors as they sound more dramatic.

Illustrations: Fantasy - human-fish hybrid. Fantasy artwork of swimming chimeras with fish heads with human legs. Credit: Diane Harris, 2002 Wellcome Images B0004399
'Monkeyana' satirical cartoon from Punch, 18 May 1861, p.206 Wellcome Images L0031419
A group of cats dressed as gentry dining in a restaurant. Watercolour. Wellcome Images V0021521

Wellcome's Christmas Gifts

Every Christmas from the 1890s until 1914, Henry Wellcome gave a book to the employees of his pharmaceutical business, Burroughs Wellcome and Co. As some of these titles remain in the Library's collections, we wondered if they would shed some light on Henry and his feelings towards his staff, as well as attitudes of employers in Victorian and Edwardian times more generally.

Among the titles, there's some fiction, a little poetry, numerous biographical works and at least one compendium. Most of the titles were popular at the time, but not all of them are remembered in the 21st century. A clear theme from the titles is that of self-improvement and utility. Through examples of self-made men promoting the virtues of hard work, Wellcome was not only giving role models to his staff, but also commenting on his own journey from impoverished childhood in rural America to wealth and success in London. A journey made through sheer hard work.

For example, in 1907 Wellcome gave as his Christmas book Samuel Smiles's Life and Labour (1887). One of the bestselling authors of the late Victorian period, Smiles advocated social advancement through the virtuous acts of hard work, thrift and sobriety. He can even be seen as the forerunner of the various self-help guides you find today. Even in Wellcome's gift of 1911 – Cassell's Book of Sports and Pastimes - there is a sense of practicality. This title was full of advice on making, mending and healthy pursuits, which suggested to the staff as they unwrapped their gifts that even their spare time should be spent in a useful, practical manner.

Another clear theme in Wellcome's choices is his growing interest in Africa. By 1914, he had not only opened the groundbreaking Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratory in Khartoum but also carried out extensive archaeological excavations in Sudan (both activities he felt had practical philanthropic benefits to the local populations).

This interest in Africa comes through in his 1914 gift, The Autobiography of Sir Henry Stanley, edited by Dorothy Stanley (Henry Stanley the journalist and explorer - another self-made man - was a close friend of Wellcome's). It's also evident in two other choices from the 1890s: Fire & Sword in the Sudan and With Kitchener to Khartoum - two titles on the British Army's derring-do in Sudan in the late 19th century.

Of the more famous works of literature Wellcome gave, Henry Longfellow's romanticised poem of Native American life, The Song of Haiwatha, is suggestive of Wellcome's childhood in rural Minnesota, growing up close to the Sioux. His choice of Gulliver's Travels is more intriguing: perhaps Wellcome saw in Gulliver's adventures a lone individual pulling himself through against difficult odds?

So, Henry Wellcome's choice of gift does offer a degree of insight into his interests and attitudes, and also how he wished to be perceived. His selections are very much of their time - as are, however, his thoughts on his staff. In 1910, Wellcome chose Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle. But he chose it for male employees. Women received copies of the Encyclopaedia of Needlework.

(A version of this post also appeared in the most recent edition of Wellcome News).

The Christmas Rose

'Bright as the silvery plume, or pearly shell,

The snow-white rose, or lily's virgin bell,

The fair HELLEBORAS attractive shone,

Warm'd every Sage, and every Shepherd won.'

With winter closed about us and the last leaves of autumn lost to the four winds, we may look in vain in our parks and gardens for a flower to raise our spirits amid the cold and gloom. That is, were it not for Helleborus niger, or the Christmas rose, which opens its petals in December and continues to bloom throughout the winter months.

A legend tells that the Christmas rose was so named after it flowered in Bethlehem when Jesus was born, watered by the tears of a child with no offering to make. Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), physician, natural philosopher, and author of the above lines of verse, was less concerned with such pious tales. When he wrote of the flower in The Loves of the Plants (1789) – a poem extolling the new Linnaean system of taxonomy – it was the great scientific advances of his age that spurred his poetic vision.

Just as discoveries in astronomy and geology were providing evidence of the long duration of time, so Linnaean taxonomy allowed the relationships between the great diversity of species, both plant and animal, to be traced. Sex was the descriptive tool for flowering plants, classified by the stamen and further ordered by the structure of the pistil. Though this was felt by some to be embarrassing, and even scandalous, Darwin revelled in the poetic possibilities such an approach offered.

With light, ironic couplets, he created vivid scenes to illustrate the many strategies of plant reproduction, transforming flowers into beings engaged in dramas of love and courtship. Of the Christmas rose, which had 'every Shepherd won', we learn:

Round the gay sisters press the enamour’d bands,
And seek with soft solicitude their hands.
—Ere while how chang’d!—in dim suffusion lies
The glance divine, that lighten’d in their eyes;
Cold are those lips where smiles seductive hung,
And the weak accents linger on their tongue;
Each roseat feature fades to livid green,—
—Disgust with face averted shuts the scene.

This sad ending to an otherwise happy encounter might remain a mystery were it not for the notes that Darwin includes throughout the poem. In a more measured prose, though brimming with the excitement of discovery, he writes:

The Helleborus niger, or Christmas rose, has a large beautiful white flower, adorned with a circle of tubular two-lipp’d nectarics. After impregnation the flower undergoes a remarkable change, the nectaries drop off, but the white corol remains, and gradually becomes quite green. This curious metamorphose of the corol, when the nectaries fall off, seems to shew that the white juices of the corol were before carried to the nectaries, for the purpose of producing honey: because when these nectaries fall off, no more of the white juice is secreted in the corol, but it becomes green, and degenerates into a calyx.

In the example of the Christmas rose, and in the many others that fill the poem, Darwin, in his bold manner, hints at how the vibrant displays of plants have gradually evolved through natural selection, a theory his grandson Charles would provide compelling evidence for some sixty years later.

The Loves of the Plants was wildly successful. Not only was it rapturously received as a poem, it was also one of the first great works of popular science. An earlier book, written as a medical treatise but which has come to be as much admired for its literary scope, also finds cause to mention the Christmas rose. In Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), the plant appears on the frontispiece, and the verse ‘Argument of the Frontispiece’ explains why it is there:

Borage and Hellebor fill two scenes,
Sovereign plants to purge the veins
Of melancholy, and cheer the heart,
Of those black fumes which make it smart;
To clear the brain of misty fogs,
Which dull our senses, and Soul clogs.
The best medicine that e'er God made
For this malady, if well assay'd.

A useful treatment for melancholy though it was considered to be, the caveat at the end of the verse hints at the darker potencies of hellebore, for the same toxins that make it an effective purgative also make it a powerful poison. So should the long winter months or the festive season play heavily upon your humours, it may be as well to keep the Christmas rose at one remove, save an admiring glance while it is in bloom, before the flower fades and the plants of spring once again renew.

The Loves of the Plants was published along with another, equally ambitious work, The Economy of Vegetation, in two volumes as The Botanic Garden (1791). The Wellcome Library holds a number of early editions of this work, along with several early editions of The Anatomy of Melancholy.

The Library also runs two related workshops, Medicine and Literature and Plants and Medicine, which further explore our holdings in these areas. For more information, and to see the associated resource guides, click on the links.

"In an admirable manner": Darwinism on the grapevine

Left: woodcut by K. Egawa after a painting by Ryūrikyō, 18th century. Wellcome Library no. 730398i

This Japanese woodcut (left: click on image to enlarge) can be considered from several points of view, one of which is its unwitting role as an illustration of evolution, or rather coevolution. A pair of vines climb up around the stem of a bamboo plant, which helps the vines to grow fruit that serves as food to a grateful bird. Each of the three organisms has an environmental niche enabled by the other two. For example the bamboo serves as a support to the vine enabling the latter to expand its trunk and extend its branches. The bird uses the grape as food and then returns the favour to the vine by kindly depositing the seeds of the grape elsewhere in a ready-made bed of nitrogen-rich fertilizer. Bamboo is grown by humans for innumerable purposes such as bamboo shoots for food and bamboo stems as scaffolding for buildings. Conversely, vines that were less able to entwine themselves around the bamboo, or failed to grow big juicy grapes, failed in the struggle for life and are no longer with us, and the same is held to be true, mutatis mutandis, for bamboo and birds.

One would think that Charles Robert Darwin would have relished it -- all the more so because one of his lesser known publications was a treatise 'On the movements and habits of climbing plants' which was read on 2 February 1865 to the Linnean Society of London, published in its Journal in the same year, and reissued with a different title and revised text in 1882 (and subsequently). He discusses questions such as exactly how climbing plants like the vine manage to pull themselves up round any kind of support such as a vineyard trellis or a bamboo. He replies with a remorselessly systematic micro-analysis of the mechanisms involved: climbing plants are of two kinds, those that revolve around a stem and those endowed with irritable organs which, when they touch any object, clasp it. Torsion, rotation and circumnutation are among their subroutines.

Wood engraving of Bryonia dioica, from Charles Darwin,
The movements and habits of climbing plants, London 1891, p. 165.
Wellcome Library

However, the larger implications are always present. For example, how does the vine find the bamboo in the first place? Natural selection is predictably his ready-made reply: "The first purpose of the spontaneous revolving movement [of an entwining plant]… is to favour the shoot finding a support" (revised version pp. 14-15).

Darwin's conclusion is as follows, starting with a dig at the ever-present Aristotle:

"It has often been vaguely asserted that plants are distinguished from animals by not having the power of movement. It should rather be said that plants acquire and display this power only when it is of some advantage to them; this being of comparatively rare occurrence, as they are affixed to the ground, and food is brought to them by the air and rain. We see how high in the scale of organization a plant may rise, when we look at one of the more perfect tendril-bearers. It first places its tendrils ready for action, as a polypus places its tentacula. If the tendril be displaced, it is acted on by the force of gravity and rights itself. It is acted on by the light, and bends towards or from it, or disregards it, whichever may be most advantageous. During several days the tendril or internodes, or both, spontaneously revolve with a steady motion. The tendril strikes some object, and quickly curls round and firmly grasps it. In the course of some hours it contracts into a spire, dragging up the stem, and forming an excellent spring. All movements now cease. By growth the tissues soon become wonderfully strong and durable. The tendril has done its work, and done it in an admirable manner."

Note the value judgment in the last sentence. In describing the tendril as having "done its work … in an admirable manner ", Darwin uses language that that would normally be applied to a craftsperson such as the Japanese artists of our woodcut. A positive admirability in carrying out a defined task seems to be what drives all the processes mentioned here. It is what makes people want to buy and disseminate the work of the painter Ryūrikyō, while the lack of it in lesser painters prevents the survival of the works of these latter.

In fact there are several layers of competition going on here. The vines, the bamboo and the bird are competing with their respective rivals in the struggle for existence. Those depicted here have succeeded. The work of the painter Ryūrikyō was carried out in such an "admirable manner" that K. Egawa made a woodcut of it – again "in an admirable manner", for he (or more likely the pressman T. Tamura) has added individual snow flakes in gouache: it is late in the season, the leaves are sere, the bird is getting cold and needs nourishment. Within the environment or context of evolution, this work is more admirable than that of artists generally considered superior, such as this 1856 dramatic scene (right) by the illustrious Utagawa Kunisada (Toyokuni III), where the gourd-bearing cucurbitacea entwines itself around a pergola.

Above right: two actors playing as Matsushita Kahiji and Konoshita Tokichi. Colour woodcut by Kunisada I, 1856. Wellcome Library no. 35847i

Moving to another layer, Charles Darwin's literary comment on the events depicted was apt enough to be quoted in illustration of the processes of the winding vines. Darwin originally wrote "food is brought to them by the wind and rain" but later changed "wind and rain" to "air and rain" to cover himself in cases such as humid summer days when the air is still. The original phrasing including the word "wind" lost out in the struggle for existence. Darwin's text has "evolved" thanks to his rephrasing of it "in an admirable manner".

Then, just as the admirable features of the luscious grapes attracted the bird, so the admirable features of the woodcut led to its being acquired by Henry S. Wellcome and reproduced on this blog named after him: as the process has got this far, it must have been accomplished "in an admirable manner". Many other prints, paintings and photographs which could have been reproduced were rejected. And if all these things had not been carried out "in an admirable manner", you would not now be reading these words, as they would, minutes ago, have lost the competitive struggle for your attention.

Within a collection of documents as broad and many-sided as the Wellcome Library, all may look at first sight as peaceful as a country hedgerow or river bank. Once you start to look at it in detail, draw connections, make comparisons, and note differences, it begins to look as complex as the habitat so vividly described by Darwin and republished in an earlier posting on this blog: seething with an invisible struggle for existence, meaning, significance, and delight.

Notes

The original version of Darwin's work was 'On the movements and habits of climbing plants', Journal of the Linnean Society of London (Botany), 1865, 9: 1-118; available online in The complete work of Charles Darwin online at http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=side&itemID=F834a&pageseq=1

The revised version bears the title The movements and habits of climbing plants, London: John Murray, 1891; available online in The complete work of Charles Darwin online at http://darwin-online.org.uk/pdf/1882_Movements_F839.pdf . Darwin's "concluding remarks" are on p. 206

The woodcut reproduced at the top has a guard sheet containing an attribution of the original painting to Ryûrikyô. The British Museum online catalogue has four paintings attributed to an artist of the same name, who is identified as an 18th century follower of Yanagisawa Kien (1704-1758). He seems to be not the same as the better-known Ryūryūkyo Shinsai (fl. 1799-1823).

London Faces: new 'Insight'

This Saturday, 2nd October, the library will feature a new Insight talk - London Faces - to coincide with Story of London events. Learn how Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and James Gillray made their own contributions to the fascinating history of physiognomy (the 'science' of face reading). See bitingly satirical pictures, original nineteenth century material and even tea towels as we revisit three key inhabitants of England's capital from a very different perspective.

Held in the Wellcome Library at 2.30pm-3.30pm. Please see details as number are limited: Wellcome Collection

Wellcome Images on screen

Photographs of books and manuscripts in Wellcome Library’s collections and images submitted directly to the photo library, Wellcome Images, are regularly featured on television programmes. Television viewers might have seen Wellcome Library material without even realising it.

Two of these programmes have been nominated for the Association of British Science Writers Awards in the “Best scripted or edited programme” category. The winners will be announced tonight. BBC Four’s Cell featured early imaginations of the cell and modern micrographs from Wellcome Images. The drawings shown here are taken from Theodor Schwann’s 1839 "Microscopic Investigations…" and were presented by Dr Adam Rutherford in the first episode of the three-part series.

The other nominated television programme, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea on BBC Two used engravings from the Library’s copy of Robert Fitzroy’s "Narratives…" of the Beagle’s voyage. Andrew Marr introduced a group of Tierra del Fuego natives with whom Darwin travelled on the Beagle, each illustrated by a portrait from the page shown here.

This year, photographs from Wellcome Images’ clinical collection were used on Channel 4’s Dispatches: Gun Crime to show the real effects of an injury caused by a bullet. Genius of Britain made use of Sir Christopher Wren’s plan of London as drawn by Gwynn. Back on BBC One, many of our images have been used in the Who Do You Think You Are? series. Most recently, two illustrations of 19th-century East London schools were used in an episode where actor Rupert Everett explored his family history.

Engravings of London slums were shown in BBC Two’s Victorian Pharmacy this month, which reconstructed life in a 19th-century pharmacy. Many more historical images have been used by the BBC this year in Children of the Revolution; The Story of Science; Victoria: A Royal Love Story; Mapping the World and Jenner’s Marvellous Medicine.

It’s not just the small screen where you’ll find our images. Creation, the 2009 film featuring Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin, used some phrenology images as part of the set. Clinical images were provided to the Harry Potter production team, who have used them to recreate wounds in the next instalment of the magical series. Finally, keep your eyes peeled for an eerie photograph from the historical collection appearing in The Awakening, a ghost story due in cinemas next year.

Author: Louise Crane

24th November 1859

Today is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. This first edition consisted of 1,250 copies, with the rapid success of the book leading to a second edition of 3,000 copies being brought out in January 1860.

First editions of Origin of Species still crop up at auction – for example, an auction of a copy, scheduled for today at Christie's in London, has caught the attention of the media.

Pictured above is the first edition of Origin owned by the Wellcome Library. Details from the Library’s accession registers, state that this copy was purchased on 31st October 1962 from the booksellers H K Elliot, for the sum of £42.

As for Charles Darwin, 150 years ago today he was away from his home at Down House, staying in Ikley Moor in Yorkshire. There, he sought the water treatment, for the ill-health which plagued his adult life.

Darwin's Inheritance

This week's Wellcome Library Insight session, is a joint event held with Wellcome Collection.

Darwin's Inheritance will draw on a range of objects, archives and illustrative materials, in order to contextualise the life and work of Charles Darwin and investigate the legacy of his discoveries in the 20th century.

The event will be held this Thursday afternoon (19th November), from 3-4.30pm. Whilst there is no need to book, spaces will be limited.

Sir Thomas Lewis

The catalogue of the papers of Sir Thomas Lewis held by the Wellcome Library is now available to view online. The collection includes much on his wartime work at military heart hospitals in Colchester and Hampstead, and with the Ministry of Pensions, where he worked on a condition he termed “effort syndrome”. This work enabled many soldiers who would previously have had to be pensioned off to return to active duty. He was knighted for this work in 1921. Another strength of the collection is the amount of correspondence with international colleagues. Lewis was renowned throughout the world, being particularly well respected in the United States where he undertook three lecture tours.

A pioneering cardiologist who coined the term “clinical science” to describe his approach of applying experimental methods to clinical problems, Sir Thomas Lewis has links to many of the archival collections held by the Wellcome Library. Whilst still a student, he was elected to the Physiological Society before being awarded the first Beit Memorial Fellowship in 1910. He worked as house physician to Sir Thomas Barlow, and alongside Sir James Mackenzie. He was an acknowledged inspiration to Sir George Pickering, Sir John McMichael and Sir Henry Dale, amongst many others. In 1941 he was awarded the Royal Society’s most prestigious accolade, the Copley Medal. Other recipients of the Copley Medal have included Charles Darwin, Francis Crick, and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin.

Darwin's Inheritance

Tomorrow's Wellcome Library Insight session, is a joint event held with Wellcome Collection.

Darwin's Inheritance will draw on a range of objects, archives and illustrative materials, in order to contextualise the life and work of Charles Darwin and investigate the legacy of his discoveries in the 20th century.

The event will start at 3pm, and although there is no need to book, spaces will be limited.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea

A new three-part documentary, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, is the latest programme from the BBC’s ongoing Darwin: The Genius of Evolution season.

The first part aired last week and is available to view through the BBC iplayer.

Keep an eye out for Wellcome Library content, supplied by Wellcome Images, during the series.

Pioneer of computing arrives in database

The Wellcome Library's online archive catalogue has just added a new name: Charles Babbage (1791-1871), the mathematician and designer of mechanical computing devices, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, that foreshadowed today's information technology. Thirty-five letters and notes by Babbage, spanning forty years, are described in the catalogue as MS.8648.

His correspondents, in many cases people also represented elsewhere in the archive collections, include Sir Roderick Impey Murchison (1792-1871), the geologist and geographer; Sir Marc Brunel (1769-1849), civil engineer and father of the more famous Isambard Kingdom Brunel; the French physicist and astronomer Dominique François Jean Arago (1786-1853) and the British astronomer and banker Sir John William Lubbock (1803-1865); and the sculptor Sir Richard Westmacott (1775-1856).

Babbage was a prickly individual, in many ways living up to the stereotype of the eccentric mathematician. It is noticeable that the letters contain several rejections of dinner invitations, although to do him justice he does also accept some and in another case he does have a very good excuse, being already “engaged to dine with Mr. Darwin.” Tantalisingly, in one undated note to Sir John Lubbock he says that he will not be able to visit Lubbock as he is “so occupied by the drawings of my new engine…”

Happy Birthday Dear Darwin!

He's the man you cannot escape this year, and although we've already drawn attention to the images we hold of him and also of the launch of the 'Tree of Life' website, we could not go through the 12th February 2009 without a post about Charles Darwin.

It was 200 years ago today that Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, but how best to celebrate? Well, perhaps unsurprisingly given the Wellcome Library has many editions of all of his books, how about reading some of them?

And for those who don't have any of his works at hand - or who have yet to access Darwin online - here's the last paragraph from the first edition of "On the Origin of species by means of natural selection..."(1859):

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved".

Happy Birthday!

A design for life?

How would you sum up the significance of DNA in a single sentence? When challenged by an Essex biology teacher in 1989, the DNA pioneer Francis Crick didn’t hesitate:

As you may have noticed, 2009 is a major anniversary for evolutionary theory. But 150 years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, arguments still rage around evolution, creationism and intelligent design. The clash of ideologies is neatly summed up by a recently catalogued exchange of letters from 2003 in Crick's archive. The writer, a US medical professor, interprets DNA’s significance rather differently to Crick, seeing it as evidence of intelligent design by a supernatural being:

'From your [DNA] model, I could only think of a supernatural or divine design and revelation through your ingenuity… [Y]our discovery has truly transformed my view of religion and strengthened my belief of a creator which I was previously very skeptical [sic] about…’

How did Crick the dogmatic atheist respond to such opinions? Back in 1991 he showed fighting spirit, rushing to the aid of a Minnesota biology teacher under pressure to teach creationist learning packs. Crick’s letter influenced the local education board to reject the packs:

‘No scientific theory is ever fully proven, though its truth can, in favourable circumstances, be made highly probable. This does not mean that some other nonsensical theory is automatically of equal value, and therefore should be presented to students.’

Evolutionary theory won the day temporarily, but 12 years later Crick’s reply to the medical professor is terse and resigned in tone:

‘I am an agnostic with a strong inclination to atheism. I think the God hypothesis is bankrupt, and that we have evolved from non-living matter by Natural Selection. Our DNA model only confirmed me in these beliefs.’

Lacking the instincts of Darwin’s Rottweiler, the letter reveals an older and wearier man unwilling to engage in apparently pointless debate.

Tree of Life

As part of its contribution to Darwin200, the Wellcome Trust and its partners have created the website Tree of Life featuring a video on evolution presented by David Attenborough. The website includes an interactive Tree of Life showing the development of life on earth. To keep abreast of news regarding the Tree of Life project, or comment on it, view the blog.

The origins of The origin

In the Wellcome Trust's headquarters, this colossal bust of Georges Cuvier stands in the atrium outside a meeting room called the Darwin Room. The irony of that conjuncture may be lost on many of the people who use the meeting room. If so, they will be in a good position to appreciate it after listening to a talk by Dr Andrew Cunningham of Cambridge University on the connections between French and English evolutionary thought, to be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday evening (8 February 2009) at 9.30 pm London time.

Were European researchers thinking along the same lines as Darwin, or were they following separate paths of enquiry? What impact did the intellectual environment of post-revolutionary France have on their scientific theories of animal development? And what role did Cuvier play in the events? Tune in on Sunday evening.

Above: Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert, Baron Cuvier (1769-1832), comparative anatomist, palaeontologist, and educational reformer. Plaster bust by David d'Angers (1788-1856). Wellcome Library no. 11959i