The precious notebook dated 1837 was returned in an envelope with Happy Easter written on it. Also found the notebook C. The police investigate. Science celebrates
Its cash value (several million pounds) disappears in the face of (inestimable) scientific value: notebook B, pinned in 1837 by a young Charles Darwin who had just returned to London from a long trip to the Galpagos with the Beagle, certainly one of the most important documents in the history of human thought. It was found after 22 years of mysterious absence from the shelves of the Cambridge Library (the University where Darwin studied, without too much success). A mystery that remains: the police investigate. Science celebrates.
On page 36 appears the most famous tree of life in the human imagination, despite the minimalist and stylized line: the drawing of Darwin’s first flash of light on the scheme of evolution, the one that connects us to all other living beings (in the meantime we have also had molecular proof of it: Homo sapiens shares more than 97 percent of the DNA with chimpanzees ). The page has a magnetic power: Darwin, having abandoned the rolling and pitching of the Beagle (and also the tensions that will drag on throughout his life with Commander Robert FitzRoy, ironically a staunch supporter of the biblical version of the origin of life), he stopped and focused the image of the tree. It is no coincidence that the page begins with I think, I think.
Together with notebook B of the so-called red series, with the color of the leather cover, notebook C was also found. Returned, would be the right term. Because inside the library (200 km of shelves distributed in various buildings as well as tunnels that wind under the streets of the town, with about 10 million manuscripts) there were no more. They had been searched for a long time until arriving in 2017 with a police report and a public appeal. We could call it a miracle of guilt, because it worked. On March 8, a mysterious hand placed an envelope on the landing in front of the library with the inscription Happy Easter. Inside, boxed and in excellent condition, were the two notebooks that will be exhibited in London in July.
The red notebook and notebook A, on geological topics, are the only ones started by the naturalist on the return journey. The series continues even after notebook C (the others have always been safe). But there is no doubt that the iconographic power of the tree of life in notebook B is unparalleled: Darwin, who passed away on April 19, 1882, will take another 22 years (another strange occasion for lovers of numbers) to publish The Origin of especially in 1859. In the first edition there is also a typo: specesinstead of species. A detail that makes a copy of 1859 even more sought after and valuable. It was an immediate success (for the time).
The long time span is due to the fact that the naturalist was not a particularly orderly man and wanted to accumulate more data. But also the fear of making his theory public, which blatantly contradicted the convictions of natural theology of the time and which, above all, would not have pleased many of his colleagues. He made up his mind only to avoid finding himself second: a similar theory had been developed after him by the younger naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Both ideas were presented on July 1, 1858 to the Linnean Society in London by Darwin’s mentor, Charles Lyell. Over the next thirteen months Darwin hastily wrote his masterpiece, which was very much indebted to those early youthful notebooks.
As Sigmund Freud later said, it was one of the moments of rupture of the narcissism of humanity: we believed we were the center of the universe when Copernicus came and told us we were wrong. We then placed ourselves at the center of nature when Darwin came and taught us that we are great apes and cousins of all other animals. Going back along the branches of that tree of life designed in 1837, we meet common ancestors with all other life forms. Finally, we took refuge in the center of the mind when Freud himself gave us the last killing blow: even in the mind we are subordinate to forces that we do not control. I wonder if it was the unconscious that dictated that unknown hand to return the precious notebooks.
Ps. Of Charles Darwin his father Robert, a general practitioner who sent him to Christ’s College in Cambridge hoping for an ecclesiastical career, said: he will never do anything good. Never talk about the future of the children.
April 5, 2022 (change April 7, 2022 | 08:59)
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