Darwin Web

[Dubh Aingeal]

The entire works of Charles Darwin have been made available online. It includes scanned works that were owned by his family — many of which were signed by the author. The University of Cambridge hopes to have this completed by 2009 and is only estimated to be about half way done. If you have any love for books whatsoever, I suggest you take a look at how they present the user with each book. Take the very first edition of On the Origin of Species, for example, where they use frames to display the text on the left with the original image on the right.

From Reuters article:

Other items in the free collection of 50,000 pages and 40,000 images are the first editions of the Journal of Researchers, written in 1839, The Descent of Man, The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle, which includes his observations during his five-year trip to the Amazon, Patagonia and the Pacific, and the first five editions of the Origin of Species.

[Paper Hearts]

This same thing was done with Shakespear's works about a year ago--pretty hip.

[Troy Spiral (13)]

For some reason i assumed this was already the case. Not that i could actually read through these things. I force-fed myself Origin of Species about 5 years ago. Was a heck of a difficult read.. very dry. (totally says nothing about human evolution btw and just talks about animal evolution)

With the way printers work though its often better to just go drop 10-20 bucks and buy the book than try to read a whole series of writings on the computer screen (omg /suicide) or print out 300 pages of paper.

I have read many articles and am an avid watcher of documentaries about such subjects. It's just that often the origional documents about such things are so far removed from what we , modern folk consider "readable" that its hard to push through much of it. Also you'll often end up with a poor view of the subjects at hand, due to even the most progressive thinkers being off the mark , not having the last 100+ years of science to show them the way.

I started in on The Federalist Papers (as an example)... haha yeah right, gave up after about 100 pages.