Yours gratefully,
Francis Darwin.
"For myself I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; ... as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to reconsider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture. So I thought my nature had a kind of familiarity and relationship with Truth."—Bacon. (Proem to the Interpretatio Naturæ.)
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION (1892).
In preparing this volume, which is practically an abbreviation of the Life and Letters (1887), my aim has been to retain as far as possible the personal parts of those volumes. To render this feasible, large numbers of the more purely scientific letters are omitted, or represented by the citation of a few sentences.[1] In certain periods of my father's life the scientific and the personal elements run a parallel course, rising and falling together in their degree of interest. Thus the writing of the Origin of Species, and its publication, appeal equally to the reader who follows my father's career from interest in the man, and to the naturalist who desires to know something of this turning point in the history of Biology. This part of the story has therefore been told with nearly the full amount of available detail.