Celebrating Charles and Abe

February 12th of this year will mark the 200th anniversaries of the birthdays of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. In honor of what is bound to be some serious bicentennial brouhaha, I plan to (or will attempt to) read and post a little something from them or about them each day this year.

To start things off, I've reopened my tattered copy of Darwin's autobiography from my Victorian autobiography class at Berkeley, complete with the neon green Ned's Used Book price sticker still on the cover.

Here is a little snippet from the first chapter written almost exactly 101 years before my own birth. It is titled, May 31st, 1876, Recollections of the Development of my mind and character.

"I may here also confess that as a little boy I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement. For instance, I once gathered much valuable fruit from my Father's trees and hid them in the shrubbery, and then ran in breathless haste to spread the news that I had discovered a hoard of stolen fruit."

An interesting footnote was also added to this anecdote by his son, Francis. It reads,

"His Father wisely treated this tendency not by making
crimes of fibs, but by making light of the discoveries."

A rather significant distinction it seems in light of the life and career that followed.