For two decades, librarians have tried in vain to find the missing notebooks in the archives.
Unknown person returns Darwin’s notebooks after 20 years / Photo: Collage: Today
The Cambridge University Library in the UK contains a huge archive of the famous scientist Charles Darwin, which includes a couple of small notebooks known as the “Tree of Life” notebooks.
They went missing over two decades ago, but an anonymous person returned them to the library in March – wrapped in plastic and placed in a pink gift bag.
Notebooks get their nickname from Darwin’s 1837 sketch of his concept of the Tree of Life, which depicts a branching tree as a metaphor for his ideas about evolution. The illustration is both simple and revolutionary.
The books went missing after being removed from a secure room in 2000 so they could be photographed for a photography project. However, a routine check in early 2001 showed that the notebooks were gone, according to cnet.com.
At first, the librarians thought that the notebooks were simply lost somewhere in the archive, but many years of searching turned up nothing. A new search in 2020 of 189 boxes of the Darwin Archive also turned up no results.
In 2020, the library launched a public call to return the exercise books, which appears to have paid off.
By the way, earlier we wrote that Darwin’s theory was declared a mistake: scientists proposed a new version of evolution.
Source: Segodnya
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