This is of interest to Darwin scholars. The Yorkshire Post reports: Online notes offer insight into evolution of Darwin’s big idea. Here are some excerpts, with bold font added by us:
Notes and comments scribbled by Charles Darwin on the pages and in the margins of his own personal library have been made available online for the first time.
Darwin’s library amounted to 1,480 books, of which 730 contain a wealth of scrawled notes, providing an insight into his thought processes and struggles as he wrote On The Origin Of Species.
Scrawled notes? Why do we care? Let’s read on:
For example, his friend Charles Lyell wrote in his famous Principles Of Geology that there were definite limits to the variation of species. Darwin wrote alongside this: “If this were true adios theory.”
Wait until the quote-miners find out about that! One more excerpt:
The majority of the collection in Cambridge University library and has now been digitised in an effort involving Cambridge, the Darwin Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
That’s nice, but the newspaper doesn’t give us a link to the collection. Never fear, we have it: Charles Darwin’s Library. That site says:
Charles Darwin’s Library is a digital edition and virtual reconstruction of the surviving books owned by Charles Darwin. This BHL [Biodiversity Heritage Library] special collection draws on original copies and surrogates from other libraries. It also provides full transcriptions of his annotations and marks. In this first release (2011) we provide 330 of the 1480 titles in his library, concentrating on the most heavily annotated books.
We haven’t looked at the collection yet, but we probably will. It’s good to have this resource available.
Copyright © 2011. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
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