Ken Singletary:

        For what it's worth, I recommend that you look at Sherwood
Cummings _Mark Twain and Science:  Adventures of a Mind_.  My thinking
about Clemens is that his conceptions of everything--including landscape
(witness the pilot v. passenger descriptions of the river in "OTM) was
far more implicated in the scientific thought of the era than we have
given him credit for to this time.

        I'm not saying that I agree with Cummings entirely--in fact, I don't
think that he goes far enough with what he does.  But there's not a whole
heck of a lot of work that's been done on Darwin and American lit, and it
might prove to be a fruitful (and marketable) kind of a dissertation.

Susan Reed
Heidelberg College