And since natural selection shares so many features with play, we may, with some justification, maintain that life, in a most fundamental sense, is playful. At Cambridge University Library, along with all the books, maps, and manuscripts, there’s a child’s drawing that curators have titled “The Battle of the Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers.”
The drawing depicts a turbaned cavalry soldier facing off against an English dragoon. It’s a bit trippy: The British soldier sits astride a carrot, and the turbaned soldier rides a grape. Both carrots and grapes are fitted with horses’ heads and stick appendages.
It’s thought to be the work of Francis Darwin, the seventh child of British naturalist Charles Darwin and his wife, Emma, and appears to have been made in 1857, when Frank would have been 10 or 11. And it’s drawn on the back of a page of a draft of “On the Origin of Species,” Darwin’s masterwork and the foundational text of evolutionary biology. The few sheets of the draft that survive are pages Darwin gave to his children to use for drawing paper.
Darwin’s biographers have long recognized that play was important in his personal and familial life. The Georgian manor in which he and Emma raised their 10 children was furnished with a rope swing hung over the first-floor landing and a portable wooden slide that could be laid over the main stairway. The gardens and surrounding countryside served as an open-air laboratory and playground.
