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I went into Philly y'day to see "Dialogues with Darwin” at the American Philosophical Society Museum. The exhibit itself was very bibliographic--lots of 19th c. books by Darwin, his commentators and predecessors (think: Lyell).

The real delight, for me, was four large whimsical display cases constructed by Eve Andrée Laramée, entitled "Luminous Darwin," an attempt to recreate "the sense of wonder the Victorians once felt for science." It included four fictional "lost" notebooks of Darwin's:

Notebook X: The Dreams of The Plants--
If a veritable analogy
exists between the
sleep of animals and sleep of plants,
it seems therefore, advisable
to consider the dreams of the plants...

A field of grass might dream collectively, or
each discrete blade of grass may
have its own nocturnal reverie.

Notebook Y: The Memories of The Stones--
as inscribed in the fossil record, the volume of mnenomic material...
makes it only possible to capture fleeting glimpses....

and Notebook Z: The Awareness of The Cells--
I see no reason to doubt the sensitivies of these creatures....

The cases also included a whole range of entirely fanciful, beautiful handcrafted Victorian-ish apparatuses for extracting these dreams, memories and awarenesses of from minerals, vegetables, animals. As I was laughingly making my way around the exhibit, taking notes and chuckling, one of the curators came over and said, "You realize, of course, that these are not real?"...

and I thought: little does she know!
How real the work of the imagination.
How unreal the residue of the intellect.
How laughable this matter of reality.