Two notebooks written by Charles Darwin returned Cambridge University, anonymously, 22 years after they were last seen. The little leather-bound books contain the scientist’s sketch of the ‘tree of life’.
The University Library has launched a worldwide call to find them., as collected from the ‘BBC’ by Europa Press. It is unknown who left these notebooks, which were placed in a bright pink gift bag containing the original blue box in which the notebooks were kept.
Moreover Brown envelope with “Librarian, Happy Easter” on it. The notebooks are from the late 1830s, after Darwin returned from the Galapagos Islands.
On one page, he sketched a tree that inspired the theory of evolution, and which, more than 20 years later, would become a central theory in his groundbreaking work on the Origin of Species.
“Natural selection and the theory of evolution probably most important theory in life and earth environmental sciences“And these are the notebooks from which this theory was built,” says Jim Secord, professor emeritus of the history and philosophy of science at the university.
The manuscripts were last seen in November 2000 will be photographed after an internal request to remove them from the library’s private collection vault.
Just two months later, they were discovered missing during a routine check-up. Initially, librarians thought they had been misplaced in the vast university library, which contained more than 10 million books, maps, and manuscripts.
But despite several searches, the notebooks were never found and in 2020 it was concluded that they were likely stolen and reported to Interpol.