ThinkingShift

Not sure what Darwin and dictionaries have in common but I’ve run out of ideas for swish titles! To excite the inner historian in you, Charles Darwin’s private papers have just been released online, including the first draft of “On the Origin of Species”. 20,000 items and 90,000 images have been released on the Darwin Online site. The private papers collection is here and the first draft of his theory of evolution is here.  And just in case you want to whip up an Irish Charlotte for dessert this weekend, Emma Darwin’s (wife and cousin of Charles) recipe book is here. Cool stuff!

And if a picture says a thousand words, then Merriam-Webster have it covered with their release of an online visual dictionary. So now you can connect words with images. A quick search for “cat” gave me images of cat breeds like these:

No LOLCat images I’m afraid.  I also could have selected the image for Morphology of A Cat and I’d get this image:

What a great resource!! I’ll be spending hours in this visual paradise. 

This looks like a fabulous, free online resource. On the Creative Commons.org site, I found news of Wellcome Images - a source of images just launched on the history of medicine, modern biomedical science and clinical medicine, being made available under a Creative Commons License. For anyone interested in the study of the history of medicine and human culture, the fact that the images are coming under a CCL unlocks a vast store of historical knowledge for students, teachers, academics and members of the public.

The collection features some interesting stuff: an oil painting of Florence Nightingale; a picture depicting Charles Darwin as an ape (below); a photograph of Alexander Fleming in his laboratory; visual images from Chinese medicine. So I set about finding some curious images.

This image is of blood vessels in the retina emerging from the optic disc (black). Amazingly colourful, you could almost hang this up as a piece of art in the home! Image credit: Freya Mowat.

If this weren’t an image of something we all fear, you might almost be tempted to have this as a piece of art work too. The image shows human cancer cells in culture. Reminds me of peacock feathers. Image credit: Matthew Daniels.

Here’s a caricature of poor old Charles Darwin depicted as an ape and holding up a mirror so a fellow ape can catch a glimpse of himself. Image credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Here’s a fascinating 1904 photo of Pavlov conducting an experiment on a dog in the amphitheatre of the Physiological Laboratory, Imperial Military Medical Academy, St Petersburg. Image credit: Wellcome Library, London.

And finally, a Parisian lithograph from the late 19th Century - a chart showing the basic elements of phrenology, physiognomy and palmistry, with diagrams of heads and hands, and portraits of historical figures. Image credit: Wellcome Library, London.

Credit for image accompanying this post: Prof R Bellairs. Image shows a 13 day chick embryo that has been stained to highlight the skeleton. The blue stain shows cartilage; the red stain shows areas where bone has started to form.

Good old evolutionist, Charles Darwin, has been digitised. Well, not Darwin himself but his letters and correspondence. As we know, Darwin spent five happy years voyaging around the world on The Beagle. Apparently, he described this episode of his life as a “magnificent scheme” allowing him to spend time “larking round the world“.

Cambridge University has chronicled Darwin’s voyages in the Darwin Correspondence Project, which digitises around 5,000 letters and summarises a further 9,000, some of which Darwin wrote at 12 years of age. There are some personal gems amongst the letters. Writing to his sister, Caroline, Darwin confesses that he only washed his feet once a month, which he confessed was “nasty”. Hate to think about the personal hygiene issues on The Beagle!

Whilst busy working on his theory of evolution, Darwin nevertheless found the time to exchange 2000 letters during his lifetime (1809-1882). Perhaps surprisingly, pigeon fanciers were amongst his correspondents. Pigeon breeding was a widespread activity in Darwin’s time and the network of pigeon fanciers provided a good opportunity to study a species under domestication. Included in the collection are letters between Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently formulated a theory of evolution by natural selection. In one letter to Wallace, Darwin observed: “I can plainly see that we have thought much alike and to a certain extent have come to similar conclusions“.

The site launched on May 17 2007 and is freely available. Darwin Online features a remarkable field notebook of the Galapagas Islands in which Darwin made detailed observations that informed his theory of evolution. The notebook was stolen in the 1980s and is still missing, but has been reconstructed from a microfilm copy. What a great resource for serious scholars or for those of us simply fascinated by history. I’ve pinched the photo accompanying this post from the Darwin Online site as it’s a classic!