f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] Voyage of the Beagle [Author] Charles Darwin [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 1989 [Read] 2012/12/14 [Review] 
Frequently exceedingly dry and of no interest except to naturalists, and probably not always them either: Darwin’s voyage was so long ago that much of his information and speculation is simply outdated (his talk of ‘miasmas’ is one instance where later information makes his material of purely historical interest). If one is reading it for background on evolution and Origin of Species, one will be disappointed: there are a handful of lines in the main part of the work which may be taken as prefiguring or groping towards evolution, and then there’s some speculation in the surprisingly short Galapagos section (I suspect he spends as much time describing the gauchos’ methods of horsemanship and dealing with cattle as he does on all of the Galapagos material!). In general, the ‘pacing’ is quite odd: reams of material on South America, some pages on the Galapagos, a dash to New Zealand & Australia, a long section on islands and ‘cacao-nuts’ (coconuts), a mini-monograph on coral atolls, and the book abruptly ends. Which is not to say he doesn’t occasionally drop in interesting or acute observations, for he does. (The shepherd-dog of South America quite took my fancy, for example.) They are just rare welcome morsels in the general desert of this door-stopper. If I had to recommend it to my past self, I would tell him to skip the bulk but to read the Tierra del Fuego sections where the events are both interesting and evocative of the long uncivilized past of man (and perhaps his future), the Galapagos section for its substantial historical interest, and maybe the brief conclusion. —- My National Geographic anniversary edition is substantially lacking in additional material; there is surprisingly little about its reception, what contributions it made, where it was prescient and where it was wrong (disturbing, since one doesn’t know what mistakes, misimpressions, outdated information, plausible yet wrong speculation, etc. one might be absorbing over the 400+ pages). As well, Darwin’s original illustrations would benefit mightily from additional material like color photographs and maps.
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