Evolving archive offers Darwin’s works online

Charles Darwin’s work has evolved again – now it’s available in an online archive that launched this month.

The creators of www.darwin-online.org.uk say the Internet trove is only half complete, but it already includes manuscripts, notebooks and other material, much of which comes from the Darwin Archive at Cambridge University.

These include the first edition of the “Journal of Researches” (1839) (or “Voyage of the Beagle”), “The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle” (1838-43) and “The Descent of Man” (1871) and multiple editions of “On the Origin of Species.”

The notebook in which Darwin recorded his thoughts on seeing the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific – where he made many of the observations that formed his theory of natural selection – was stolen in the early 1980s. But the transcribed text is available in the online archive.

The archive is expected to be complete by 2009 – the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the first publication of “The Origin of Species.”