When Charles Darwin labored over word choice while writing On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,
he could not have known that one day any student of the humanities and
sciences could peer over his shoulder to see him pen the words,
“difficulty of highly perfect organs.” On November 24, 2009—to
celebrate the 150th anniversary of Origin’s publication—Darwin is going digital. The Darwin Manuscripts Project
will place online about 10,000 high-quality images of Darwin’s
scientific manuscripts and notes. These pages include 34 of the 36
known and located draft leaves of Origin, gathered together for the first time since Darwin wrote his seminal book. (Image AMNH) “These rare manuscript leaves from Origin
are the crown jewels of our project and show Darwin in the process of
writing,” says David Kohn, Director and General Editor of the Darwin
Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History. Kohn has
been editing Darwin for decades, beginning with Darwin’s correspondence
and now continuing with the other half of his archive, his scientific
papers. This project began in 2005. “I’ve sat in the Cambridge
University Library since 1974, touching these documents, but this is
the first time that anyone can do this—online in this quantity and with
this quality.” His co-editor for the Origin leaves is Randal Keynes, great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. The Darwin Manuscripts Project (darwin.amnh.org)
is a digital scholarly edition of Darwin’s scientific manuscripts based
at the Museum and is carried out in collaboration with Cambridge
University Library and the Biodiversity Heritage Library, represented
by the Natural History Museum in London. The rare draft sheets from Origin
are owned by a number of institutions, including the Smithsonian
Institution, the American Philosophical Society, and Cambridge
University Library. The Museum also owns one sheet from Chapter 6 of Origin that Kohn finds particularly interesting because this is “where Darwin deals with the difficulties of the theory.” In addition to the rare Origin
drafts, the Darwin Manuscripts Project will also put online about
10,000 additional images of Darwin’s material. Notebooks and scientific
writing from the Beagle period through the Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex,
published in 1871, will be available with transcriptions and curatorial
notations. Examples include the notebooks that chronicle Darwin’s
discovery of natural selection, the only extant fair copy sheet of Origin, and drafts from his botanical books, among other items. The
Darwin Manuscripts Project also includes a key to all things Darwin.
This is DARBASE (Darwin Union Manuscripts Catalogue), a new, massive,
searchable database that tracks the network of knowledge about Darwin’s
scientific papers. Developed together with Cambridge University
Library, whose collection is the backbone of the database, this new
tool will also include the Darwin holdings from all other libraries in
the world. Over 60,000 Darwin items and closely-related Darwin material
are described in the database in accurate detail. “This
is an extraordinary resource,” says Michael Novacek, Provost of Science
at the Museum. “The Darwin Manuscripts Project takes advantage of new
technology to bring the fruits of Darwin’s extraordinary mind to a much
broader audience, much like the Museum’s 2005 exhibition on Darwin that brought his theory, life, and science to the general public.” Future
projects for the Darwin Manuscripts Project include compiling and
digitizing additional Darwin manuscripts as well as reconstructing his
library. Darwin was famous for reading widely on a variety of subjects
ranging from insect-eating plants to pigeon breeding to the immorality
of slavery. He would fill margins and inside covers of his books with
copious annotations and passionate marks. For example, he wrote on the
margin of one of Charles Lyell’s books, in which Lyell proposes that
species don’t change beyond a definite limit, “if this be true, adios
theory.” Over 700 of his most heavily annotated books are held at
Cambridge University Library and will now be reproduced as
high-resolution images, and his transcribed marginalia will be
digitally available. “The
extensive marginalia preserved in his library reveals Darwin as not
simply a curious reader, but an active interrogator, questioning and
commenting on the works of Humboldt, Lyell, Spencer, and Agassiz,” says
Kohn. “Now with this digitalization project, readers can follow the
conversational thread that changed our thinking on the origins of
species and gave birth to modern evolutionary science.” The
Darwin Manuscripts Project is funded by two grants from the National
Science Foundation, and a new grant from JISC/NEH Transatlantic
Digitization Collaboration program will fund the work to digitally
reconstruct Darwin’s working library as it stood at the time of his
death in 1882.
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