"In a few day's time the Beagle will sail for the Galapagos Islands. I look forward with joy and interest to this, both as being somewhat nearer to England, and for the sake of having a good look at an active Volcano."

Thus wrote Charles Darwin on 12 July 1835 in a letter to his mentor J S Henslow, a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. This month, 177 years after Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands, Cambridge University Press are sending a complete set of his published correspondence to Charles Darwin Research Station, a research facility based on the Islands.

The published correspondence is the work of the Darwin Correspondence Project which was founded in 1974 by Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith in order to publish the definitive edition of letters to and from Darwin. The Project has staff in both the UK and US, those in the UK being based in Cambridge University Library, England, which houses the largest single collection of around 9,000 letters.

Project Director, Professor Duncan M. Porter, said:

"The Galapagos Islands were essential to Darwin's evolutionary ideas. It is important that our volumes are being sent to the place where Darwin's questions about how organisms change over time began to be answered, leading in a few years to his theory of evolution by natural selection."

CDRS is the operative branch of the Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos Islands, an international, non-governmental, scientific, non-profit organization dedicated to the protection of the Galapagos Islands.

The connection between the islands and the University of Cambridge stretches back to 1835 when Darwin, a graduate of Christ's College, visited the volcanic islands as part of his international voyage on the Admiralty ship, HMS Beagle. He spent five weeks on the islands, making collections of the native plants and animals and observing their natural history. These specimens would later provide important evidence for Darwin as he developed his theory of evolution.

The Galapagos plant specimens now reside in the Herbarium at the University of Cambridge. Darwin shipped them back to Cambridge for classification by JS Henslow, a fellow of St. John's College, Professor of Botany and the founder of the University's Botanic Garden.

Two years ago Dr Tim Upson, Superintendent of the Botanic Garden, visited the Islands to assist in a historical reconstruction of Darwin's footsteps. The purpose of the trip was to identify the sites where Darwin found the different plant specimens he collected. The trip was led by the historian Professor David Kohn, a Visiting Fellow of Clare Hall involved in the Darwin Correspondence project.

Darwin's correspondence provides historians with an invaluable source of information, not only about his own intellectual development and social network, but about Victorian science and society in general.

When the published correspondence is complete, it will comprise approximately 14,500 letters published in 32 volumes and will provide, for the first time, the full authoritative texts of Darwin's letters. The letters are accompanied by detailed explanatory footnotes and relevant supplementary materials, and offer unparalleled insight into Darwin's work and life.

The series has been described by the Sunday Times as 'one of the triumphs of post-war publishing in England' and by the Quarterly Review of Biology as 'a work of magisterial scholarship'.

It has been awarded the Founder's Medal of the Societyf or the History of Natural History, and the Modern Language Association of America's first Morton N Cohen Award for a distinguished edition of letters.


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