These documents reveal Darwin as a very fine observer and experimentalist, who was attuned to nature’s intimate details. His many attempts to decipher the structural details and the functional meaning of flowers, and, likewise, to understand the animal origins of human emotional expression constitute the two areas where Darwin’s post-Origin experimental and observational researches were most thoroughly articulated. Many Victorian devotees of science, whether or not they were practicing naturalists, were captivated by Darwin’s striking narrative applications of natural selection to explain the exquisite contrivances that fit organisms to their place in the economy of nature.