I was recently re-examining a short letter written by Charles Darwin in 1860 to Asa Gray, since I had used an excerpt of it to discuss speech acts and text type with my students. I began looking at the clause structures and became puzzled by the relative clause in the passage quoted below which is punctuated as a non-restrictive relative. I began to wonder whether this clause "who is not a convert" really has a restrictive force to it and has been punctuated by Darwin in a way that would be unconventional today. There is a clearly restrictive relative at the end of the passage, so we see that Darwin does seem to make the distinction in his punctuation. "What you say about my book gratifies me most deeply, and I wish I could feel all was deserved by me. I quite think a review from a man, who is not an entire convert, if fair and moderately favourable, is in all respects the best kind of review.... It is the highest possible gratification to me to think that you have found my book worth reading and reflection; for you and three others I put down in my own mind as the judges whose opinions I should value most of all." (1) How do you read "who is not a convert"? Can you read it non-restrictively? (2) Were punctuation rules for restrictive vs. non-restrictive relative clauses established by the mid-19th century? Were/are there differences between British and American punctuation of non-restrictive clauses? (3) Could this instance be merely a Darwinian eccentricity? I might add that I just went back to the Gutenberg Project page where I originally read this letter, <http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext00/2llcd10.txt> and I searched the text for occurrences of "which" and found that the punctuation in Darwin's correspondence is pretty regular, though there are a couple of relative clauses set off by commas that I find difficult to read as non-restrictive. R. Michael Medley, Director Intensive English Program Professor of English Eastern Mennonite University, Harrisonburg, VA 22802 To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/