World Culture: Darwin’s library notes unveiled online

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”.

The series of transcriptions accompanying each page allows everyone to see which passages Darwin found relevant to his work, stimulated his thinking, or just annoyed him as he read the work of others. 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”.

The majority of the collection is held 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 - allowing everyone to retrace how Darwin systematically used reading to advance science.

The first phase of this project has just been completed, with 330 of the most heavily annotated books launched online on the website of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.