A Brill Calendar: February 12

Darwin's Genius

Few conventions based on documenting and ordering the past are so taken for granted as commemorating anniversaries.

These range from private, domestic birthday-parties for family & friends to the avalanche of publications and activities associated with crucial events or with the birth and death dates of individuals acknowledged by posterity to be truly great. As soon as the number of bygone years tallies with the radix of the decimal system, or multiples of it, the festival (which can last from just one day to one whole year), is organized with added splendour & effort.

An awareness that this custom is not as timeless as the specific cause of this festive phenomenon adds a certain poignancy. The collection of a galaxy of traditional record-keeping chronicles with a narrow horizon into an omniscient ‘Wikipedia’ stands on the shoulders of some three centuries hard work by fastidious antiquarians, collators, editors and printers with a taste for encyclopaedic comprehensiveness. It is a wonderful wealth of ‘data’- to be discerned from ‘information’ and most certainly from ‘knowledge’ - teeming with surprises.

Take the calendar day of February 12 2009, for instance. One doesn’t need to be a prophet to predict that most media will devote attention in some way to an Englishman, the biologist Charles Darwin (The Mount, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, February 12 1809 – Down House, Downe, Kent April 19, 1882). Without his great gift to the world, evolution theory, life on the planet would not be understood now the way it is.

As if one genius wouldn’t be enough for one very special day, the birth-register of the globe produces a second icon in the person of an American, the lawyer Abraham Lincoln (Hodgenville, Kentucky February 12 1809 – Ford’s Theatre, Washington, District of Columbia April 15 1865). His great gift to the world, abolition of slavery in his country, took much longer to be understood by generations succeeding him; featuring its ultimate achievement seen only on January 20, 2009, by the Installation of the 44th President of the United States of America.