According to John van Wyhe, an academic at the National University of Singapore and the leader of the project, the library “shows how insanely eclectic Darwin was.”
“That’s been the fun part, not the formal books but the other things…all of which pool together to make the theories and publications we all know,” he added.
Previously, scholars had believed that the 1,480 books found in Darwin’s home and at the University of Cambridge in England made up most of his library.
However, they only covered about 15 percent of his materials. The additional new titles were discovered in historical documents about Darwin’s library from several different time periods.
Some of the earliest works in Darwin’s library date back to his school days. They include his headmaster’s geography textbook from 1818 and a copy of Oliver Goldsmith’s A history of England, published in 1821, which Darwin won as a prize.
Most of the items in the collection were written in English, and the rest appeared in languages like German, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and Danish.
The size and diversity of the library indicate that Darwin spent a lot of time studying the knowledge of others to build upon his own research, which helped contribute to how he came to the scientific conclusions he did.
“This shows how determined he was to find out what other men of science had published and to extract information relevant to his theories,” said van Wyhe.
