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