Darwin’s Personal Library Including 13,000 Items Is Now Available To The Public For The First Time Ever
Over the course of his life, the famed English naturalist Charles Darwin kept a vast personal library with books on subjects ranging from art to philosophy.
On February 12, which was the 215th anniversary of Darwin’s birthday, it was announced that his personal library was published and made available to the public for the first time ever.
After almost two decades of meticulous, painstaking work, researchers were able to compile a 300-page catalog detailing 7,400 titles across 13,000 items that Darwin kept in his possession, including journals, pamphlets, and reviews. Readers may access these texts in the digital anthology “The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online.”
Darwin was most known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His theory of evolution is described in his 1859 treatise On the Origin of Species, which proposes that all species of life descended from a common ancestor and were shaped for survival through natural selection.
The proposition is now generally accepted and considered a key concept in science that has changed the world.
In addition to his own publications, Darwin had an array of volumes on various subjects. His shelves were lined with books on biology, geology, finance, farming, travel, psychology, history, philosophy, religion, and cures for chronic diseases, as well as atlases.
His collection also featured book sections and newspaper clippings with strange titles, such as “The anatomy of a four-legged chicken” and “The Hateful or Colorado Grasshopper.”
Furthermore, an auction sales record reveals that Darwin won an article dating back to 1826 by ornithologist James John Audobon.
It was titled “Account of the habits of the Turkey Buzzard (Vultura aura), particularly with the view of exploding the opinion generally entertained of its extraordinary power of smelling.”
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According to John van Wyhe, an academic at the National University of Singapore and the leader of the project, the library “shows how insanely eclectic Darwin was.”
“That’s been the fun part, not the formal books but the other things…all of which pool together to make the theories and publications we all know,” he added.
Previously, scholars had believed that the 1,480 books found in Darwin’s home and at the University of Cambridge in England made up most of his library.
However, they only covered about 15 percent of his materials. The additional new titles were discovered in historical documents about Darwin’s library from several different time periods.
Some of the earliest works in Darwin’s library date back to his school days. They include his headmaster’s geography textbook from 1818 and a copy of Oliver Goldsmith’s A history of England, published in 1821, which Darwin won as a prize.
Most of the items in the collection were written in English, and the rest appeared in languages like German, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and Danish.
The size and diversity of the library indicate that Darwin spent a lot of time studying the knowledge of others to build upon his own research, which helped contribute to how he came to the scientific conclusions he did.
“This shows how determined he was to find out what other men of science had published and to extract information relevant to his theories,” said van Wyhe.
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