Chaos of Delight

Today is the last day of the Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. If you’ve missed it, don’t despair since the exhibit is moving on to Boston, Chicago, Toronto and London. Perhaps the rural counties of Kansas should be included on the tour for maximum effect. I’ll provide only one tidbit from the show, an exceprt from a letter Darwin wrote expressing his joy and excitement upon first seeing the Brazilian rainforest, “ ... if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect, one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over; if turning to admire the splendour of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight ...”