Writing made Darwin. Ironically, writing was never easy and Darwin admitted that there “seems to be sort of a fatality in my mind leading me to put first my statement and proposition in a wrong or awkward form.”

 Darwin never became a skilled writer. Even one of Darwin’s greatest champions, Thomas Huxley, had to struggle through Darwin’s “awkward form.” Huxley concludes: “Exposition was not Darwin’s forté.”

 Rising to the challenge of writing, though, unquestionably became Darwin’s most enduring endevour. The Origin of Species was translated in Darwin’s lifetime into Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, and Swedish, and it has appeared in an additional eighteen languages since. Darwin described the book as just “one long argument from the beginning to the end.”

 Today though, The Origin of Species is only rarely included in academic science curriculum. Huxley writes that not only is the Origin difficult to read, it “is one of the hardest books to understand thoroughly that I know of” and “the Origin of Species is one of the hardest of books to master.”

 Have you, or anyone you know, read The Origin of Species from beginning to end?