Darwin's Children Drew All over the "On the Origin of Species" Manuscript (2014)

Summary

By Benjamin Breen – Published February 12, 2014 Yesterday was Darwin Day, marking the 205th anniversary of the great naturalist’s birth on February 12, 1809. One of the great things about Darwin is that a huge amount of his work is digitized and freely available via sites like Darwin Online. Interested browsers can also check out the Darwin Manuscripts Project, a collaborative initiative based at the American Museum of Natural History. Here you can read through Darwin’s personal notes, including gems like his scratched out book title ideas. There are also a number of nature drawings that Darwin prepared while writing his masterpiece, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). Here, for example, is Darwin’s rather skillful drawing of the stamen of a Strelitizia flower: Cambridge University Library DAR 49: 115r But there are other drawings in Darwin’s papers that defy explanation - until we remember that Darwin and his wife Emma (who, famously, was also his cousin) had a huge family of ten children. Scholars believe that a young Francis Darwin, the naturalist’s third oldest son, drew this on the back of Darwin’s manuscript for On the Origin of Species. “The Battle of the Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers” Cambridge University Library Remarkably, this is one of only twenty-eight pages of the manuscript that still exist. The Cambridge University Library has given it the descriptive name “The Battle of the Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers,” and so indeed it seems to be. As near as I can make out, it shows a turbaned soldier mounted on a blueberry squaring off with an English dragoon on a carrot-steed. Perhaps inspired by the 1839-1842 Anglo-Afghan War, and filtered through the Darwin household’s fascination with plants and gardening? Here’s another drawing from the talented Darwin children, this one seemingly directly inspired by their father’s work. Birds are in the act of catching a spider and a gnat or bee, while flowers and a butterfly appear in remarkable...