—CHARLES, ON ANNIE, 1851 Other than losing Mary Eleanor as an infant, nothing terrible had happened to the Darwin family. They had had the usual bouts with childhood illness, including the recent scarlet fever, but nothing out of the ordinary. Still, Charles could be an anxious and worried father. His own health was so bad, he was afraid he had passed it on to his children. He now worried that Annie had inherited his wretched digestion. It was hard for Charles to concentrate on work with Annie being listless and weak, so unlike her usual energetic, engaged, cheerful self. He gave her and Etty a canary, hoping it would cheer Annie up. He watched as his daughters played with the bird and taught it how to sing. In the Galapagos, the finches from the different islands were less like each other than birds on the mainland. The birds had evolved because of their island environments. It was those birds that had given him one of his eureka moments about natural selection. He would use them in his argument.
