The Origin Summary / Study Guide

The Origin | Characters

Stone helps to demythologize the great naturalist and thus make him more accessible to the reader by presenting him within the circle of brilliant scientists of nineteenth-century England such as Charles Lyell, Joseph Hooker, Thomas Huxley, and Alfred Wallace. While presenting these learned men in terms a twentieth century reader can understand. Stone evokes Darwin's character, making him warmly, humanly appealing as well as possessing characteristics of a genius. Stone captures Darwin's exterior defenses, the socially retiring modesty which his visitors often took as genuine simplicity;...

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