Darwins Sciences aims at both general and scholarly audiences. Its a biography with a difference: rather than proceeding chronologically, it is organized according to disciplines or intellectual topics, with separate chapters on Charles Darwin as geologist, zoologist,  botanist, and social scientist. Usefully correcting the popular misconception of Darwins career as culminating in one great work (Origin of Species) published when he was 50, Darwins Sciences shows how the great naturalists lifelong interest in the gradual, incremental ways living forms change and adapt generated a series of long- and short-term projects and publications spanning various disciplines. Taken as a whole, Darwins distinct accomplishments as geologist, zoologist, botanist, and social scientist support, explain, and amplify his ground-breaking, paradigm-shifting theory of evolution by natural selection. But besides appraising scientific accomplishments, publications, and discoveries, Darwins Sciences sheds light on Charles Darwin the person. Drawing extensively on his correspondence, notes, and autobiography, the accounts of his contemporaries and descendants, and cultural history, the book shows Darwin as a devoted husband and family man, a pioneer in an emerging profession, and a pillar of Victorian society, a paradoxical figure who was both a conventional yet progressive country gentleman and an intellectually brave yet emotionally reluctant iconoclast.