13th May 2004

Steve Hughes has loaned me a beautiful edition of Darwin's Journal . I realise that I had all too readily taken a narrow view of Darwin's system hierarchical classification of the species as outdated. Darwin's writing is extraordinarily descriptive, indeed stunningly beautiful, and there is great sensitivity to the detail in which the beauty of the object resides.

Below some small masses of guano at Ascension, and on the Abrolhos Islets, I found certain stalactitic branching bodies, formed apparently in the same manner as the thin white coating on these rocks. The branching bodies so closely resembled in general appearance certain nulliporae (a family of hard calcerous sea-plants), that in lately looking hastily over my collection I did not perceive the difference. The globular extremities of the branches are of a pearly texture, like the enamel of teeth, but so hard as just to scratch plate-glass. ( Darwin's Journal During the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, Ward, Lock and Co., (1889), p. 7)

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