Darwin Online Digitizes the Complete Library of the HMS Beagle

"Charles Darwin’s voyage on the HMS Beagle is famous for having led to some of the most groundbreaking work in evolutionary biology. Data gathered during the five-year, globe-spanning expedition was central to the evidence Darwin presented in his 1859 title On the Origin of Species, which introduced the concept of natural selection and the theory of evolution.  This voyage so intrigues people to this day that almost every written work produced by Darwin on the ship has been made public—from his diary to his letters. Everything, that is, but the largest collection of materials that likely influenced his thinking—the library on board the Beagle. John van Wyhe, a senior lecturer at the National University of Singapore has digitally reconstructed the famous Beagle library and made it accessible to Darwin scholars and others studying that period in history. He said that this library, which has not existed as a collection for almost 180 years, is what he would have liked as a scholar when he was editing Darwin’s Beagle field notebooks in 2006. 'By putting it online this allows anyone to gain, in a very short time, a very different impression of Darwin’s voyage. One can almost instantly appreciate that he was not alone—he had the scientific work of many of his predecessors at his fingertips. He was quite literally standing on the shoulders of giants,' van Wyhe wrote in an email. The library, now accessible on the Darwin Online website, builds on a list created by the Darwin Correspondence Project, which initially listed 132 books inside the Beagle. Additional research has been used to reconstruct the list so that van Whye’s Beagle library now has 404 searchable volumes of books presumed to have been on the ship with Darwin. That comes to about over 195,000 pages and more than 5,000 illustrations available online that range from books on geology to literary works. The infographics below offer a detailed breakdown of the different characteristics of the collection ..."