“... the introduction of anaesthetics, or they wouldn’t have been able to carry out their work (Charles Darwin quit medical school because he couldn’t bear to watch operations). During the fad for phrenology there was speculation that surgeons, in common with butchers, had a large ‘Organ of Destructiveness’ visible as a lump above the ears, which ...”

“... of the professional scientist. In his Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830), Charles Babbage dismissed the amateur tradition of science as wholly inadequate to the serious advancement of scientific knowledge. As young men now applied themselves to the study of law, he argued, future scientists must devote themselves to the mastery of ...”

“... Talking’, from Standing Female Nude (1985), and ends with a feeble squib, ‘Mrs Darwin’, a poem from Duffy’s work-in-progress, The World’s Wife. This looks as though it may turn out to be a literary equivalent of Sally Swain’s Great Housewives of Art, a mildly amusing feminist stocking-filler of a few years ago which featured novelty ...”

“... women whose bodies have an enviable integrity and a fleshy, non-replicative beauty that razzes Charles Darwin.’ For Greer these are ‘failed women’, ‘spurious females’, and the chapter of The Whole Woman in which they appear, along with mainly male-to-female transsexuals, has the title ‘Pantomime Dames’. We might pause at that ...”

“... Beside it, like an elaborate lotus rising from the dunghill of the Thames, was A.W.N. Pugin and Charles Barry’s New Palace of Westminster, about which Ashton says almost nothing. Covering eight acres of unstable gravel beds, it required, as Caroline Shenton writes in her most recent book, Mr Barry’s War: Rebuilding the Houses of Parliament after the ...”

“... points out, even Cleland’s bawdy Fanny Hill really subscribes to the same beliefs: when with her Charles, the amorous heroine suffers, as Cleland would have it, from ‘this conflict betwixt modesty and love-sick longings’. A heroine who is not bewildered by her modesty, who is not ignorant of the nature of sexual acts and contracts, is in great danger of ...”

“... and requires some massive scholarly leverage; W.J.T. Mitchell invokes the secular trinity of Darwin, Marx and Freud. He traces the historical origin and development of our ideas about dinosaurs, through evolutionary theory and palaeontology (primarily Darwin and Cuvier), 19th and 20th-century history of ...”

“... same year that the first international congress on eugenics was held in London, at which Leonard Darwin, son of Charles, put forward ideas for ‘improving the breed of the race’ by eliminating inferior strains. ‘The criminal, the insane, the imbecile, the feeble in mind, the diseased at birth, the deformed, the deaf ...”

“... William Godwin set out on a tour of the Midlands. He had hoped to visit, among others, Erasmus Darwin, but finding the naturalist away from home, Godwin asked Darwin’s wife for a letter of introduction to Robert Bage instead. To his surprise, Mary Darwin said she could not properly ...”

“... Zheng He brought two giraffes to Nanjing and hailed them as qilin, a gentle hooved chimera. Charles I’s chaplain, Alexander Ross, wrote in Arcana Microcosmi in 1651 that the sheer fact of the giraffe made it impossible for naturalists to ‘overthrow the received opinion of the ancients concerning griffins … seeing there is a possibility in nature ...”

“... the natural scientist John Tyndall, and many social scientists and social reformers such as Charles Booth and Beatrice Potter (later Webb). Moreover, many who could not accept the whole package of Comtean positivism still tacitly or explicitly acknowledged its intellectual inspiration. Both Darwin and Herbert ...”

“... of the computer. The true rulers of Britain are ‘merit Lords’ appointed for life: Lord Darwin, Lord Bentham, Lord Brunel and above all Lord Babbage. Charles Babbage really lived, of course (though not as a Lord), and really invented merit lordship, the computer, and many other improvements in mechanism. All one ...”

“... websites. A student of the 19th century, Dr Carson has also stated that Satan entered the heart of Charles Darwin and gave him the idea of the theory of evolution to undermine God’s word.)*In Pennsylvania, it is revealed that the Republican candidate for governor, Scott Wagner, lost $631,000 in campaign funds over the summer through unsuccessful ...”

“... extinction became indisputable, it attracted a particular kind of Victorian sentimentality. In Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863), the chimney-sweep Tom meets the last great auk, a ‘very grand old lady’ sitting on ‘Allalonestone’ who tells the story of their extinction before weeping tears of pure oil. It’s revealing – if not ...”

“... In​ 1739, Captain Charles Le Moyne was marching four hundred French and Indian troops down the Ohio River when he came across a sulphurous marsh where, as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it, ‘hundreds – perhaps thousands – of huge bones poked out of the muck, like spars of a ruined ship.’ The captain and his soldiers had no idea what sort of creatures the bones had supported, whether any of their living kin were nearby and, if so, what sort of threat they presented ...”