When I was in graduate school, studying emotion and the biological basis of behavior, I had a wise professor who insisted that serious students should learn not just current theory and research, but also should understand their intellectual heritage. That is, students should have an understanding of whose thinking influenced that of their teachers, and whose thinking influenced their teachers' teachers, and so on.
As a student, I was tasked with tracing this intellectual heritage by investigating whose work the current theorists I was studying had cited and built upon, and then whose work those people had cited and built upon, and so forth. It was a bit like performing a genealogical study, except that instead of tracing a family tree composed of kinfolk, I was tracing who was related to whom in an intellectual sense. This task entailed not just identifying who were the influential thinkers in 'my' lineage, but also reading their major works in their original form. The idea was to read what the important theorists had to say in their own words, instead of relying on derivative descriptions, summaries, or reviews by those who followed.
This was a very enlightening exercise, and I would recommend it to graduate students in any discipline. In my case, it seemed that all paths ultimately led back to Charles Darwin. In my field, Darwin's works, and particularly On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), were the foundation upon which all successive theories of emotion and behavioral biology were built. I read these seminal works in their original form, albeit as reprints owned by my university's library. In the process, I became interested not just in Darwin's theories, per se, but also in the life course of this man and his thinking.
I have just learned that Darwin's papers -- manuscripts, publications, notes, drawings -- were made freely available online last week. The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online claims to be "the largest publication of Darwin's papers in history." Here is a brief descriptive excerpt from the press release that announced the new online collection:
For decades available only to scholars at Cambridge University Library, the private papers of Charles Darwin, one of the most influential scientists in history, can now be seen by anyone online and free of charge. This is the largest ever publication of Darwin papers and manuscripts, totalling about 20,000 items in nearly 90,000 electronic images.I'm much more interested in having a look at Charles Darwin's notes from the voyage of the Beagle than his wife's recipe book, but the point is that these documents, in Darwin's own hand, have not been available on line until now. In addition to the publications, notes, and manuscripts, the website also claims to have "the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue ever published."
This vast and varied collection of papers includes the first draft of his theory of evolution, notes from the voyage of the Beagle and Emma Darwin's recipe book.
This website will rank as one of the top treasures of the internet, I am sure. The only problem I see, after where to begin, is finding the time to pore through the thousands of items offered.
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