.. >> is about 50 minutes. >> i want to start by thanking

the library of congress. it really is an exceptional library in the world. access to all people, whatever their nationality, free, at no charge, extended hours in the evenings and on saturdays. even formally sunday afternoons so perfect for people who are working at other jobs. it provides shelves for researchers, study desks. and no charge for reproducing images. this is really quite amazing and this is true for everyone so thank you to the library of congress. now, for my particular work the library has also been exceptionally helpful because there are very few libraries in the united states whose collections go back as far as the first half of the century. if you used the national union catalog and looking for books on

sciences coming out of the europe and britain, you see dlc which is the abbreviation for the library of congress. the holdings are here and they're access enjoyable all. -- accessible to all. another reason the library has been so helpful to me in writing this book -- i mean, i was quite daunted and i went to cambridge and i got all this material from darwin's notebooks and how in the world am i going to find these references here? you'd have to be in cambridge or at least london. i thought, how am i going to do this? well, then i started combing through the notebook references and, binge, lc check, binge, lc, check way to go, lc! why is it so rich here? well, the answer -- it took me to realize this, darwin was on an exploring expedition as you all know in the beagle voyage going around the world. and his main library were works of exploration.

geography and who collects works of exploration? governments. and then what do governments do when they are out of date, they send them to the national library. boom, boom, i think i only had one reference in my work on the darwin's red notebook that was not here at this library. so we're even superior to say to harvard in that regard because -- or to cambridge because the math room at the university of cambridge is there g-it doesn't have the breadth of geography and the areas associated with it. so i'm completely indebted to the library as are so many scholars i see in this room. now, the title of my talk is the

arc of ambition, charles darwin, geologists. the arcs rise and fall. and that's what i'm going to talk about today, the rise and fall of darwin's earliest grand ambition. his ambition to create a theoretical basis for the science of geology. his basic idea was that geology would turn out to be simple. that's what he said. geology will turn out simple. and the simplicity came in his mind from a balancing of forces between the rise of the earth's crust, elevation and its fall, subsidence. so he thought when geologists figured this out, rise and fall, they'd really understand geol y geology. the current foupgs -- foundation for plate tectonics it is quite

simple. his theory in a strange way resonates with what turned out to be true. well, the story i'm going to tell today then is about darwin's first great ambition. we all know him mainly from his having achieved his second great ambition in evolution. so we'll have to set that aside for a moment and talk about his first great ambition. now, i think most of you know the outline of his life, born 1809, february 12th, same day as our own abraham lincoln. studied medicine somewhat at the university -- at edinboro university. dropped out of medical school. then went to the university of cambridge to take the regular arts degree with the intention of becoming a cleric in the anglican communion. beagle voyage, 1831-1836. 10 years following that spent publishing his results in the voyage and in 1859, writing the origin of species, which was his

master work. and which has proved the foundation of modern biology. now, there are four parts of my story, darwin before the beagle voyage, the beagle voyage itself and the high point of darwin in the late 1830s and then the period after 1839 when darwin confronted a rival hypothesis to his own idea of a simple geology. this rival hypothesis being -- put forward by lewis aggasi who ended up teaching at harvard. this proved to be somewhat of a transatlantic rivalry, too. all right. now, before the beagle voyage taking hold, darwin was fortunate enough to be born into a highly educated family so like someone like mozart, he got a very -- he got a running start. his own paternal grandfather

published his own idea of geology and it's summarized in the section of the earth that appears in one of his works. you can see the earth's crust, the outer circle. and the inner core of the earth is fired. he believed in a molten earth. he was a follower of james hutton. in a broader sense, charles, his grandson followed in this huttonian tradition. now, his own father practiced medicine, as had his grandfather. it was a medical family. and his own father didn't publish terribly much, although he was a member of the royal society of london but he did permit his sons the run of the house and that included setting up their own chemistry laboratory in the greenhouse in the back and he didn't let them do it inside and, of course,

they were all sort of family friends of joseph priestly and company so doing chemistry at the time make making all the gases so we can assume there were a certain number of explosions. one thing that sort of fell out unexpectedly for me for my study was that darwin was more of a chemist than i had realized. he knew how to do a lot of reactions and he recognized a lot of substances. this was very useful as he became a geologist. now, once he finished his arts degree at cambridge, he was not quite ready to settle down. and like many young people, he wanted to see the world. the particular book that inspired him was alexander von humboldt's personal narrative of his own voyage to the new world. and with humboldt in mind he sought with some friends passage on a ship that would take them to canary islands. now, his mentor at cambridge, a

very distinguished teacher named john stevens henslow, had some idea of darwin's capacity and having trained darwin in botany decided geology was a good science for men who wanted to get out in the field. so after taking his degree in the spring of 1831, darwin was put on fast forward for learning some geology. he was sent out to prentice with adam sedgwick who was in the process of inventing what we called the cambridgian system and they did field work in the early formations in north wales and that was the summer of 1831 and here is darwin's own hammer. it's the actual one he used. it's shaped like a carpenter's hammer on one side but then it's a more chiseled point on the other side.

it's sort of a lightweight all-purpose hammer. and he went out to survey the area around his home in the west of england. and this was the compass he used. you can see the compass face on the bottom. and if you turn this on its side there's a plomb box will drop down. you'll want to know the angle which they are dipping on the horizontal and i can see the face-up, the degrees are marked off whereby you would be able to make some measurements. again, this is a very handy pocket instrument. okay. this is one of the first maps he made. this is around his hometown. the shaded area on the map -- it was originally colored orange and that was to mark the extent of the new red sandstone

formation. a very famous old formation in that area of the world. so in the summer of 1831, darwin's schooling himself to become a geologist. then at the end of the summer, the beagle offer comes. henslow himself had been offered the post but he was newly married and not about to take off on a two-year venture around the world. now, the beagle voyage was one of many voyages sent out by the british admiral during this napoleonic period. one of the things the british decided to do after their victory in 1815 was to survey the coastlines of the world. with permission of those who owned the coastlines. and then these charts became freely available and to the credit of the british, they didn't attempt to retain this information for their own use anyway. anyone could purchase these. and they sent out a number of

these vessels every single year. francis boford after whom the boford wind scale was named was running the operation at this time. it was a very competent civil service. now, they were also cheap. they paid the wages of the military officers but a naturalist, well, no, they'd give them a free berth and darwin's father footed the bill for darwin's five-year journey and someone once said it runs a $50,000 range and the family's contribution to science and darwin could have freedom and run his own research efforts. now, henslow was set out. he said i consider you to be the best qualified person i know who is likely to undertake such a situation. [laughter]

>> i state not in the account of a sup position of you being a finnish naturalist but is amply collecting and observing and noting anything worthy to be noted in natural history. so with a couple of geological training behind him and a little more in zoology and botany, darwin went out and this was the actual map of the formations in england that he had with him aboard ship. you can see on the upper left hand side of this map, it's a folding map, are different colors. they stand for different formations. and what we call the geological column is just getting developed at this period so that the colors of the bottom, the little ticks at the bottom, those would be the oldest formations and the ones at the top of the column, those would be the youngest formations and then they would -- you'd color the exposures, which formation was atop of the surface and could be seen when you went through an

area so that was the sort of tradition in which darwin was given to train. now, let's run through on what he did on the beagle voyage according to the henslow rubric of collecting anything worthy and collecting, darwin collected about 2,000 geological specimens during the five years that the beagle voyage was out. this is not really a huge number. some of you saw the article on wallace's collections on the "post" a week or so ago. wallace the 5100 insects in case. wallace was in the business of selling specimens. darwin didn't have to do that so he really didn't collect a huge number of specimens all together on the voyage but he collected very carefully. henslow had trained him not to just pick up pretty rocks or interesting ones but to look for the characteristic rock in a formation and then label it on the spot and then draw a

diagram, show where it existed and then write-up your interpretive notes. in short, this was school. so darwin technique, just to give you an example, this is a page on his notes on south america and i can see he's trying to explain what's going on. there's a number at 1858 and at the bottom of the page he's trying to show where the different rock types exist in the strata. he's a little nervous about his drawing ability and he said this is not really an exact representation of nature. this is schematic. but you can see him trained -- that his training, brief though it was, was excellent. so all the specimens he came back with are pretty useable because we know where they're from. they're alli.erq)e's an example of labeling. this is a rock, that's the

bottom word. that's a superficial deposit in pampas. and there's a piece of brown paper written in ink and he wrapped the -- the specimens, the samples, in this paper and then put it all in his collecting bag. today geologists tend to use plastic bags, ziploc bags we use for leftovers. but they work perfectly well and they're cheap. no plastics in those days so they used paper. here's another example of a rock specimen, 1079 with a labor quartz rock of falkans rock and he collected some black volume c can -- volumic sand and these bottles were a nice container

and food and geology had some collection even back then. now, as far as interpreting what he was doing, he had the disciplinary training from his years -- for his months really with henslow and sedgwick. and what geologists were trying to do at that time was to trace formations worldwide. they wanted to see if the same series of formations that they saw in britain and in europe were also the case around the world. so people going on circumnavigations as darwin was was very useful to geologists. he collected a lot of fossils with the intent of carrying those with those characteristic of british strata. now, as i mentioned, geology was and is a very geological science and here's a map that went out on the beagle voyage. by the way, this photograph is

from the lc collection and classic aerosmith map of the pacific of the period that darwin went out. and you notice how many things are still unknown. look at the southern coastline of australia. they still haven't chartered that yet. this is 1820s, these maps are from 1820s. there was still a lot of raw exploratory to do on coastlines. and here's the map that -- the chart that was done the galapagos islands. and the rest of the crew -- it was a surveying expedition and they surveyed the islands and the exquisite chart is the basis -- it's the basis for all subsequent work. if you go to the lc map room and call out islands, it pulls up

this. geology was very important. now, what else? i did mention to you that darwin was very interested in elevation subsidence. he got this a lot from charles lyle, the geologist had just published a three-volume principle. darwin picked that up from him and used it more dramatically than lyle did. and the piece of geology that darwin is best known for is his theory of the origin and distribution of coral reefs. it had been lyle's view that coral reefs sit on the base -- have as their foundation subsiding mountain tops. and he even correlated the shape of an atoll with a shape of a

volcanic crater. darwin, who was actually in the pacific which lyle was not thought this was a bit much. to imagine that mountains just subsided just enough so that atolls could grow on them. darwin also thought elevation of subsidence more in terms of continent-size patches rather than in small districts. lyle was sort of small-area elevation and subsidence. darwin thought more in terms of continental science pieces. so darwin thought of the whole pacific as an area of subsidence. now, the place that he had the best opportunity to actually climb around on a coral reef himself was in the keeling islands in the indian ocean and this is a quite beautiful

drawing he did of the keeling islands and in his view, the coral reefs were formed by -- were built on a gently subsiding ocean floor. and that they might be thousands of feet thick. this was not something that could be tested at the time because people couldn't get very far below the surface of the water. although, they dropped lead plum bobs toward 1,000 feet so very, very deep for the period. darwin noted how quickly coral reefs fall off. how they dropped down very dramatically and you can see that in his coral -- in his coral -- his drawing of the keeling islands. the charting of keeling islands was done by this voyage and keeling islands were not recharted until the 1940s during world war ii. so they did very fine work.

here's the basic theory -- darwin's basic coral reef theory. land subsiding and coral reef growing up on top of that. darwin's explanation for atolls was different. he didn't think the top of the atoll was determined by the shape of the underlying ground. he rather thought that it had something to do with the quality of the water inside the atoll. that's turned out to be true. coral reefs need a lot of oxygen in the water. for the alge need that. so darwin didn't know quite why but he thought they needed active water surf. this by the way was his idea was not his own. he picked it up from a french voyage that had gone out six or seven years ago. there's a lot of circulation of knowledge among these voyagers and the french were very active in the pacific. now, what to do with this idea about coral reefs?

darwin had the idea of correlating movements of the earth with coral reefs as an indicator for subsidence and mountains and volcanos is an indicator for rising land. he got -- he got the idea of representing this material from a man named george pollack skrup who had written a book on volcanos in the 1820s. this is a lovely colored map again from the lc collection. points of eruption are indicated in red and lines of elevation are indicated in gray. and what he'slóx doing that's pretty novel is looking at the world as a whole. this is really global geology. and this was, of course, very sympathetic, a very harm --

harmonious. after the voyage darwin put together his information on the coral reefs in this wonderful chart, which appears in his 1842 book on coral reefs. and it's a survey of the oceans, the pacific and indian ocean and blue areas indicates subsidence and red areas indicate elevation. so this is -- this coral reefs theory was the basis of his simple geology and it was sort of also the ticket for his ride home because he wrote to lyle about it even before he got home. and lyle, to his credit, said i think you've got a better idea and arranged for darwin to present his material at a meeting of the geological society of london very shortly after he arrived home. so that's the voyage and that's the -- and that's the theory. on the way home from the voyage,

darwin expressed himself very ambitiously on this subject, excuse me. he said geology the whole world will turn out simple and i've applied all this to vertical movements and he really thought he'd cracked the egg. and in his great enthusiasm, he referred to himself always during this period as a geologist. he wrote, i geologist, have ill-defined notion of land covered with ocean, former animals, slow force cracking surfaces, truly poetical. in his note he goes on to talk about what he means by poetry and he draws on william woodsworth preface to the lyrical ballads. and woodsworth writes, poetry is the first and last of all knowledge. it is as immortal as the heart of man.

the remotest discoveries of the chemist, the minimalists will be proper objects of the poetic's art as to any that can be applied. woodsworth is inviting men of science to with regard what they're doing as being poetic and darwin accepted this, and he -- he thought of himself and his own identity as a geologist and explicitly romantic terms. so the first few years after the voyage he came back in 1836. for the next three years, he was full of his theory of elevation and subsidence, presenting different portions of it in meetings of the geological society1éq of london. the coral reefs bit came first. he also did a corresponding paper on elevation. where he tied together volcanic phenomenon he had witnessed in south america to the rise of the andes. well, this was the apex of darwin's ambition.

and he used this mechanism of elevation and subsidence to describe a whole host of geological factors. one i haven't yet mentioned but will since it became very important in the next 20 years was an explanation for how erratic boulders arrive on the surface of ground. erratic boulders are a geologist' name for superficial rocks that appear as debris on the surface of the ground. what makes them erratic is they are unlike the country rock. they are rock some distance away. and the question was, well, how do they get there and often thes3ñ erratics are very large. they're not pebbles so how do they get there? well, lyle's explanation which darwin followed was that these erratics were rafted on icebergs, which sailed around the ocean, and as mountains came up above the surface of the

ocean, the iceberg would jame into it and then drop its rocks and the mountain would continue going up and if you wanted to get a rock from one place to the other, an iceberg is how you imagined how it happened. it was a pretty good explanation and ina some cases it's actual true. so darwin was feeling that he really had sort of -- really had a fit for everything. okay. then trouble. onto the scene came a man named lewis aggasi who was two years early born in 1807. he had ambitions to accomplish things at the very highest level of science. he was going to take on the world. and his foray into the world was his glacial hypothesis. he had grown up in switzerland

and, of course, there are glaciers in switzerland and he was aware of the advanced and retreat of glaciers across seasons. and he noted, as did others, that when glaciers retreat in the summers they leave rocks behind them. they furrow up and plow up a lot of land. the glacier will move it and carry rock away and retreat. and that was his explanation for glaciers. they were moved by glaciers. when he got here he set up the museum of comparative zoology at harvard and set up a marine and botanical building and a great promoter and he knew he couldn't publish his ideas in small swiss journals. he had to take his ideas -- he had to travel with them. so in 1840 he came to britain and he toured the british isles with british geologists and

said, ah, that was formed by a glacier. that was formed by a glacier. those rocks in scotland, glacial. and he knocked the british geological establishment back on its heels. and they were extremely impressed, a bit nervous 'cause there were no glaciers in scotland as it took some imagination. but they were impressed that his hypothesis was the most impressed with the discussion. his first response was really a reaction, you know, full-blooded, angry, emotional. we think of darwin as a fairly benign quiet man but if you look at his first publication the voyage of the beagle published in 1839 he uses an appendix to go after agassi.

he called him not equipped to do inductive science. you know, he's really very hostile. and darwin even goes into -- imagines how he could explain swiss glacial -- swiss erratics using a iceberg-floating mechanism. he meets agassi on his own terrain. and he sends him a copy of his book. [laughter] >> agassi didn't reply. soñaz his first response was rey reaction. then, however, he settled down and i think this is where darwin really shows his mettle. he could s that agassi was gaining ground and maybe glaciers play some role and it's glaciers and icebergs and then he thought, i really have to see for myself. now, this was a problem because for reasons still unknown, darwin became quite debilitated by the time he was 30 years old.

he had trouble even walking so far as a mile. so he couldn't really climb the andes or anything like it. he couldn't climb the mountains in scotland so he went to the closest place he might see what rock in the united kingdom that was termed of glacial origin and that was in north wales in the area that's now the national preserve and wales is very convenient because it just to the west of his childhood home. so he dragged himself not there. he couldn't have climbed that mountain but to a much lower spot. this is agassi got himself buried using a glacial erratic as his tombstone. [laughter] >> he was3p his own p.r. person. so there's agassiz.

anyone looking familiar with glacial terrain today would recognize this as having been formed by a glacier. scoured sides. but darwin had visited there as a young man and just enjoyed climbing and thought of it as just a mountain. he went back and started to look at it through agassiz's eyes and he was especially impressed to identify rocks such as these. these are the actual ones he looked at. which are glacial erratics perched on the side. he now says they are glacial erratics. he spent a week there. he said it took about a week what he called a good glacial eye. and he said now that i look at this scene, it's as obvious to me that a glacier was once here as it would be if you visited a

house -- a site of a former fire where you see embers and yougç know a house must have stood there. this is that obvious. so he became a convert to the glacial theory. and this meant revising his earlier work in geology. he really toned down the theoretical aspect of all the parts of his geology that he published in the 1840s. he's no longer considering really a simple geology in quite those terms. he really backs off. it also makes him more sophisticated from a methodical point of view. he now says how foolish it is in science to trust the principle of exclusion. that is to think that an explanation must be true if you can't think of any other. there may be something that you haven't thought of. and he felt this his whole life and that the humbled temperament informed how he wrote the origin

of species. he's always trying to bring the reader in and to say this may not be entirely true or this will have to be investigated by other people. he's not presumptuous at all and this change in tone compared to the cockiness of his early -- of his youth, i think, comes from his reaction, his response to the glaitial theory. sometimes greatness comes from not what you accomplish positively but by how you respond to challenge. and i think darwin's strength comes through in this episode quite sharply. he defended his own theories as long as he could and then he studied a rival theory and eventually came over to it. and if you read the origin of species, you'll notice there's a lot on glacial effects on distribution of plants and animals on there. so that -- by that period, he

had thoroughly integrated glacialism into his world view. thank you. [applause] >> does anyone have any questions? yes. >> i heard often mentioned that one of the big criticisms of the time of his evolutionary theory was the time frame. everybody thought the earth was so much younger. i mean, glaciers took a long time to carve those mountains. how did the theory of a younger earth conflict or did it coincide with it? how did his glacial theory -- or not his but agassiz's concept? >> well, no one knew how old the earth was in absolute terms among geologists and they tended during this period not even to assign a name.

assign -- i mean, an absolute number. they were interested in relative standing of the various geological formations. i think the point you make is absolutely true, though, that it would take time for these glaciers for these formations. but the geologists at that time really up until the late 19th century didn't try to assign numbers to the age of the earth or to formations or very, very rarely. darwin does in the origin of species -- and he gets his hands boxed because he assigns -- he said oh, if this formation lays down an inch every 100 years if it's that thick it's that old and his extrapolation was that

long. they weren't talking about the age of the earth as a whole. so it's not really until the 20th century that you get with radioactivy that you get away of coming up with real numbers. so i would say a young earth wasn't so much of a problem. you can also speed up evolution up if you want to. >> i was hoping you could expand on something that you alluded to in your discussion and then seemed to drop, the whole issue of worldwide distribution of units. >> oh, yeah, worldwide distribution of units. darwin tried to collect fossils particularly from older fossil strata what he was out. for example, the brachiopods he collected at the falkans islands are at the british museum today and they were used to correlate

the system. rog the director grabbed those brachiopods showed they were the same he found in britain and said, yes, this is a worldwide system. and, of course, the british geologists are very nationalists and they have given an index series to the formations of the world. yeah, so he was very much interested in that. it was with sort of under instructions to gather that kind of material. >> you didn't site any publication or anything where he lays out any of this -- >> well -- he sometimes said -- he didn't know -- geologists were team workers and he's bringing this material back for other geologists. in fact, he said one time, i'm a lion's provider. in other words, i give this stuff.

roderick merchson who was a big deal scooped up darwin's fossils and wrote on them. so even before -- this was of months within his time back and if you look at the system 1839, there's a big section on -- he's already publishing on darwin's brachiopods. and, of course, darwin, you know, other people returned the favor. when darwin publishes on his three -- his trilogy of geological book in the 1840s which comes out of the voyage, one on the coral reefs and volcanic islands and the mountains in south america. they are not all things that he collected. and where were these fossils stored? here's the importance of big central collections. at the time they were stored at the geological society of london. the british museum had a minimal

collection at that time. so they -- the geological society of london had a pretty active museum at that time. >> did darwin think the glacier formation, and did he recognize the insufficiencies of the mechanisms that were known at the time for explaining about the graphic patterns and, you know, in any sense, did anything he do sort of, you know, hint what came later? >> did you hear the question did darwin's explain his own formations of the species adequate or was there something missing? darwin became very conservative about explaining species distribution by moving continents around. oddly.

later in life. he got really burned by his simple geology falling apart and he became what we could call a stablist. there were some people who wanted to explain the connection of new world and old world fawn and flora by imagining an atlantis in the middle of the atlantic, a continent. and a man named forbes was pushing this idea. darwin really -- he said this is a bad idea to invent this until you absolutely have to. so he was against that. and what he actually did -- he still like the icebergs. he was always very interested how you can raft one thing to the other. so icebergs -- he never rejected icebergs completely. there was always birds who could fly seeds around. he loved stories about logs that floated across the ocean. so once burned twice wary. he was -- he was ready to try to explain everything with the continent pretty much where they are now.

although, i mean, he was always very deferential. we don't know everything. there's a lot of caveats. [inaudible] >> that was aerosmith that was a company. yeah, that was actually an enormous map down here in the library. i mean, it's like the size of the front of the room and aerosmith also published a little sort of guide to it and so that's what i reproduced. the big one -- i mean, they were trying to put everything on this big map. aerosmith was a london map-maker and map seller what was interesting and impressive about him he didn't embroider. where they didn't know something they left it blank. the tendency of map makers was to fill in and extrapolate but aerosmith didn't do that.

yeah. >> i know darwin's own home is open to visitors and i wondered if the boyhood home can also be visited and if there's anything much to see? >> when was last there you couldn't. it was actually a tax office. but i mean, they would sort of let you go in and you could look around. the boys -- one thing about the house architecture that was interesting charles and his brother shared the same room. and it's a big, large room and they were both collectors, robins eggs, fossils and you could see this place was stocked full of stuff. and it looks on to the river. it's right in the back and there's some speculation that the phrase, you know, darwin talks about the entangled bank in the last paragraph of the origin, that he actually was recalling the bank of ivy that he saw when he looked out his window as a child and looked to the river 'cause it's an ivy-covered bank. it's nice.

there is talk, i think, of taking that over and making it open also. it's an impressive house. very nice. in the back room. >> my tenth grade biology book, i brought the wrong one. i was in an anglican school but i got the catholic edition. [laughter] >> it had this long passage other boys didn't have was by gregory mendel it's okay for you catholic skills to study biology did it because mendel did it. if darwin and mendel had met the protestant resistance to study biology might have been diminished. any contact between those guys? >> yeah. a copy of mendel's papers is one of darwin's collection. but he seems not to have read it.

of course, it was in german. which darwin only barely read or struggled with. but i think mendel was taking such a different approach to his that it would have been necessary to hear someone talk it through. you know, i mean, you see why scholars go to conferences. if an idea is really, really new, it's too hard to read. too hard to grasp it just from reading it. if there'd been a conference and, you know, mendel had been there and, you know, other people would have talked, you know, i think they would have gotten on. but mendel was, of course -- and mendel didn't -- you know, he dropped his work and he went back to being head -- he was an administrator of the monastery. as far as the protestant negative reaction is really early 20th century.

there was more so. even in this country, for example, joseph henry, the head of smithsonian was a supporter and a curator therefore. you don't -- the reaction is really 20th century interestingly. someone, yeah. >> i was very interested in the influence of romanticism in darwin's motivation as a scientist? were other scientists -- did they also in his era have it? >> yes, it was very common especially for those who traveled because a lot of romantic poetry has to do with travel. also, the poets were greatly beloved so everyone read them. really, everyone.

i suppose, popular music is a little more. and they quoted them. and then, of course, the darwin team was very close to the romantic poets. some were supported for a while by some of the wedgewds who were the maternal side of darwin's family. i mean, literally supported. his living was supported. and so they knew them. and, of course, woodsworth was cambridge and they knew them. there were others who read them and the poets reciprocated. there's a lot of geology in some of the poetry, yeah. [inaudible] >> scientists who rejected romanticism as antiscientific. >> i don't think romanticism was anti scientif antiscientific. they're looking at the subjective side. yeah.

is that a question? okay. >> well, thank you very, very much for coming. and sandra will be signing her book just outside the door. and please take a look at some of the magazines and we even have children's books and some of the treasures. and i'll be around to tell you anything that you need to know about the books. thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> sandra herbert is professor emarus at the university of maryland baltimore county. during 2006/2007 she was a distinguished visiting scholar at cage bridge where she assisted the university with plans to celebrate darwin's