THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 



407 



THE PEOGRESS OF SCIENCE 



DARWIN'S MANUSCRIPT 



There is here reproduced the text of 

 two pages of the original manuscript 

 of " The Descent of Man " in the hand- 

 writing of the author. This manu- 

 script, as well as the portraits by Lock 

 and Whitfield and by Maull and Fox 

 reproduced above, we owe to the kind- 

 ness of Mr. Charles F. Cox, president 

 of the New York Academy of Sciences, 

 who has permitted the use of his val- 

 uable collection of Darwiniana. With 

 the manuscript, the handwriting of 

 which is somewhat reduced in size, is 

 given a transcription, and in the second 

 column the text as it finally appeared 

 in the first edition of the " Descent of 

 Man" as published in 1871, Volume I., 

 pp. 42-43. 



The manuscript shows the great 

 amount of revision which the author 

 made in all his work. It is corrected 

 and interlined, and when it appeared 

 in print it had been largely again re- 

 written by correcting the proofs. Thus 

 the author evidently expected this mat- 

 ter to appear in Chapter I., but made 

 additions which carried it over into 

 Chapter II. Darwin's daughter, Mrs. 

 Litchfield, who assisted him in the cor- 

 rection of some of his later works, 

 says: 



" He did not write with ease, and 

 was apt to invert his sentences both 

 in writing and speaking, putting the 

 qualifying clause before it was clear 

 what it was to qualify. He corrected 

 a great deal, and was eager to express 

 himself as well as he possibly could." 



In the "Life and Letters," Mr. 

 Francis Darwin writes: 



" Perhaps the commonest corrections 

 needed were obscurities due to the 

 omission of a necessary link in the 

 reasoning, something that he had evi- 

 dently omitted through familiarity 

 with the subject. Not that there Mas 

 any fault in the sequence of the 

 thoughts, but that from familiarity 

 with his argument he did not notice 

 when the words failed to reproduce his 

 thought. He also frequently put too 

 much matter into one sentence, so that 

 it had to be cut up into two. 



" On the whole, I think the pains 

 which my father took over the literary 

 part of the work was very remarkable. 

 He often laughed or grumbled at him- 

 self for the difficulty which he found 

 in writing English, saying, for instance, 

 that if a bad arrangement of a sentence 

 was possible, he should be sure to adopt 

 it. He once got much amusement and 

 satisfaction out of the difficulty which 

 one of his family found in writing a 

 short circular. He had the pleasure of 

 correcting and laughing at obscurities, 

 involved sentences, and other defects, 

 and thus took his revenge for all the 

 criticism he had himself to bear with. 

 He used to quote with astonishment 

 Miss Martineau's advice to young au- 

 thors, to write straight off and send 

 the MS. to the printers without cor- 

 rection. But in some cases he acted 

 in a somewhat similar manner. When 

 a sentence got hopelessly involved, he 

 would ask himself, ' Now what do you 

 want to say?' and his answer written 

 down would often disentangle the con- 

 fusion." 



