One night some 40 years ago, I was working late and alone in the library at the Marine Biology Laboratory at Woods Hole (in those days, the library never really closed), searching for something in the 1882 volume of Archiv für Protistenkunde. As I opened it, out fell a folded page from the magazine The Nation (still publishing today), dated 27 April 1882.

The page, headed 'Charles Darwin', was his obituary. As far as I know, it has not been reprinted or indexed in, for example, the Darwin archive at http://darwin-online.org.uk. There is no indication of the author's identity, although it would be gratifying if it were his supporter and friend, the American botanist Asa Gray.

I was impressed by the prescient observations on Darwin. For example, the final paragraph points out “There can be little doubt that Mr. Darwin's name will go down in history as that of the greatest scientific inquirer and the most pregnant scientific thinker that has lived since Newton. Since the beginnings of modern learning, probably no single idea has wrought upon the minds of men with such rich and manifold results as the idea of 'natural selection'; and it is evident that what we have already seen is but an earnest of vastly more that is to come.”