Whilst Looking At A Piece About Charles Darwin,

I remembered, 

back in September 2010 we visited his home Down House, when he moved in he had 2 children, eventually having ten children, six boys and four girls, seven of whom survived into adulthood by the time he finished writing, “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life,” but it was not the manuscript as such I was reading about, it was about what some of his kids did with it! 

 once Darwin had sent a fair copy of the manuscript off to his publisher, John Murray, he made the rest of his changes to the book directly on the galley proofs, and evidently he wasn’t worried about the originals, so as paper was not readily available, the kids used the back of the manuscript to draw on,

 and these are some of the sketches,

 it is thought at least three of the kids were involved,

  Francis, who became a botanist,

George, who became an astronomer and mathematician, and Horace, who became an engineer, thanks to the Darwin Manuscripts Project, an effort by scholars at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, to digitize, annotate, and make public online some ninety thousand pages from the Cambridge University Library’s Darwin collection, “The scope of the enterprise, of what we call evolutionary biology, is defined in these papers,” David Kohn, the D.M.P.’s director, commented, “He’s got his foot in the twentieth century.” though the project focuses on Darwin the scientist, there are glimpses of him as a father, too, some of which are here, among the twenty-six thousand pages that have so far been digitized are fifty-seven pages of the Darwin children’s drawings, nine of them on the back of the manuscript of “On the Origin of Species.” I hope that the next time we visit Down House there will be a few of the original kids drawings on display, for the full story have a look here.