WIKIPEDIA, POPULAR SCIENCE VOL.57On the voyage of the HMS Beagle, Darwin lived and worked in a cabin that housed the ship’s library—404 volumes that spanned works by naturalists and explorers of the time. Now, a virtual recreation of the library, published online this week, gives readers a glimpse of the evolutionary biologist’s life at sea, where he came up with his theory of natural selection.
The reconstruction, led by science historian John van Wyhe of the National University of Singapore, catalogs more than 195,000 pages of text and 5,000 illustrations. The project began in 2006 when van Wyhe was editing Darwin’s Beagle notebooks, and struggled with Google searches to identify words and terms, he told Nature News. The digitized, transcribed volumes are intended to make such searches simpler.
The library “provides an unprecedented insight into the journey that changed science and our understanding of the world,” van Wyhe told Nature News. “Darwin has such a wide appeal, and there’s nothing more romantic and exciting about Darwin’s life than the voyage of the Beagle. We’re practically giving you the whole ship right here.”
Although most of the tomes are nonfiction, the ...
