Prize divide

many difficulties not satisfactorily explained by my theory of descent with modification, but I cannot possibly believe that a false theory would explain so many classes of facts as I think it certainly does explain. On these grounds I drop my anchor, and believe the difficulties will slowly disappear.’ One of the virtues of Janet Browne’s outstanding biography, is the unassuming manner that respects and conveys the spirit of the subject so well. Underlying this is a foundation of facts, perfectly Darwin-like in character, as steady and solid as Down House. But her sympathy does not obstruct her vision: she notes his assumption that he should get more from his correspondents than he gave back, and, more sharply, his failure to attend colleagues’ funerals. In the face of criticism of natural selection for which scientific answers were not yet available, he gave increasing weight in successive editions of the Origin of Species to other possible means of evolutionary change. It fell to Wallace to keep natural selection at the forefront, despite his equally ardent commitment to spiritualism which dismayed Darwin. In other circumstances Darwin worked his way around God. Emma Darwin wrote her husband a letter urging him to find comfort in the Lord. Darwin could not but in the margin wrote ‘God bless you.’ His concept of natural selection tested the beliefs of some of his strongest supporters. The geologist Charles Lyell was genuinely worried by the spiritual consequences of what Darwin was proposing. He found it hard to go ‘the whole orang’ he confided to Huxley. But he himself was unflinching in his belief in natural selection, that sex and mechanisms of reproduction lay at the heart of the issue and that God had nothing to do with it. Given the generally devout and prudish society within which Darwin had operated so effectively and won so many to his revolutionary point of view, Browne’s book flags up just what such an achievement that was. At his death, Darwin influential supporters were able to ensure a burial in Westminster Abbey, England’s most important church, alongside some of Britain’s other great scientists. But as Browne’s book emphasizes these achievements were the result of Darwin’s powerful interactions with place. She notes from the Times obituary: no one has ‘wielded a power over men and their intelligences more complete than that which for the last twentythree years has emanated from a simple country house in Kent.’ Magazine R831