The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals usually been viewed in its relationship to Darwin's conception of "natural selection" as the central mechanism of evolutionary development, which he probably grasped some time around September 1838. These notes have a tentative and fragmented quality, especially in Darwin's descriptions of conversation with his father (a successful doctor with a special interest in psychiatric problems) about recurring patterns of behaviour in successive generations of his patients' families. Darwin was anxious about the materialistic drift in his thinking – and of the disrepute which this could attract in early Victorian England – at the time, he was mentally preparing for marriage
The Man in the Moone la Lune" (1657); Cyrano's traveller actually meets Gonsales, who is still on the Moon, "degraded to the status of pet monkey". It was one of the inspirations for what has been called the first science fiction text in the Americas, "Syzygies and Lunar Quadratures Aligned to the Meridian of Mérida of the Yucatán by an Anctitone or Inhabitant of the Moon ..." by Manuel Antonio de Rivas (1775). The Laputan language of Jonathan Swift, who was a distant relation of Godwin's, may have been influenced by "The Man in the Moone", either directly or through Cyrano de Bergerac. "The Man