A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK "[An] extraordinarily wide-ranging
and engaging book [about] the men who shaped the work of Charles
Darwin . . . a book that enriches our understanding of how the
struggle to think new thoughts is shared across time and space
and people."-The Sunday Telegraph (London) Christmas, 1859. Just
one month after the publication of On the Origin of Species,
Charles Darwin received an unsettling letter. He had expected
criticism; in fact, letters were arriving daily, most expressing
outrage and accusations of heresy. But this letter was
different. It accused him of failing to acknowledge his
predecessors, of taking credit for a theory that had already
been discovered by others. Darwin realized that he had made an
error in omitting from Origin of Species any mention of his
intellectual forebears. Yet when he tried to trace all of the
natural philosophers who had laid the groundwork for his theory,
he found that history had already forgotten many of them.
Darwin's Ghosts tells the story of