On today’s Word By Word, host Gil Mansergh helps us travel back 112 years to join the hardy young men who spent a year and a day collecting specimens on the Galapagos Islands for the California Academy of Sciences (CAS). Our guide is Dr. Matthew J. James, Chair of the Sonoma State University Department of Geology, a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, science advisor to the Galápagos Conservancy, and a Governing Member of the General Assembly of the Charles Darwin Foundation.
His book Collecting Evolution: The Galapagos Expedition that Vindicated Darwin was written to “set the record straight” after overhearing a CAS staffer tell visitors that the expedition “arrived in San Francisco with the fires still burning from the 1906 earthquake.” In fact, the ship didn’t sail through the Golden Gate until Thanksgiving of the same year.
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