The Guardian reports today that about 90,000 pages of manuscripts, field notes, photographs and sketches connected with Charles Darwin are being placed online, where they can be viewed free. The material is the last major set of additions to the Darwin Online project, started in 2002 and based in Cambridge, and which claims to be the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue created.
According to the Guardian,
One set of pages that is likely to attract considerable interest is Darwin’s scrawled first draft of his theory of evolution from 1842. The scribbled argument is crammed with afterthoughts, footnotes and crossed-out text. A transcript of the text has been published previously, but few will have seen the original facsimile of Darwin’s unpolished thought process.