Darwin\u27s Irish correspondence

peer-reviewedSearches of Darwin?s correspondence show that some 160 letters crossed between him and naturalists and others with an Irish address. While few in number, compared to Darwin?s 14,000 other known letters, some of this correspondence provoked frequent exchanges between Darwin and his closest collaborators, occasionally leading to amendments to The origin of species or becoming material for Darwin?s other publications. The absence of Darwin references in the contemporaneous Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy or journals of the Royal Dublin Society, where local naturalists published their work, has to be viewed together with the absence in those journals of references to the Irish famines. Other publications of a broader cultural focus engaged both topics in a lively way. Darwin?s correspondence was also surveyed for the subject of the island of Ireland, in relation to observations on the distribution of a small group of plants common to Asturias in northern Spain and to the south and west of Ireland, but absent elsewhere in Europe. Patterns of distribution of mitochondrial and Y-specific human DNA markers in western Europe that overlap the distribution of these Asturian plants suggest a common cause for both sets of observations. A modern hypothesis based on these DNA findings is supported by the observations made 150 years ago