The Complete Works of Charles Darwin

Let me start with the obvious: Darwin is hot. Popular books celebrating his legacy have been the rage for the last two decades and then some. Now the discoverer of evolution by natural selection has the website he deserves, sponsored by Cambridge University. I can't vouch that site lives up to its name, but 50,000 pages of searchable text, both published and manuscript, should meet the needs of the most serious scholars. The website also claims to have and the largest catalog of his manuscripts and the largest Darwin bibliography. The latter, with nearly 2,400 entries, starts with Darwin's earliest publications and goes through 2005. It's sortable by oldest or most recent entry, and also by relevance. Many entries link to the full text. Other features include mp3's of Darwin's well know texts as well as from selected letters. One drawback to the site is that there doesn't seem to be any easy way to track down images. Case in point: I sought in vain for Darwin's 1848 tree of life sketch, where he first proposed, in the privacy of his notebooks, common ancestry for all organisms. The image is easily retrievable through Google Images.

Causal admirers of Darwin are also well served. A homepage link for non-academic browsers provides easy access to Darwin's best known works, including the first (1859) edition of The Origin of Species. All images from each text can be viewed alongside the corresponding text.

Tony Doyle
Hunter College

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