Access Darwin's Origin of Species For Free Online

The original draft of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was published online along with his other manuscripts, papers, photographs and notebooks.

The published draft contains more than 20,000 items with 90,000 electronic images and was made possible by The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online Project (Darwin Online) and Cambridge University, which holds all the originals of Charles Darwin’s works.

Darwin Online since its introduction in October 2006, has had over 37 million hits.

John van Wyhe, the director for Darwin Online told Associated Press:

"This release makes his private papers, mountains of notes, experiments and research behind his world-changing publications available to the world for free,"

You can check out this work here. It has both text view and image view and you can browse the contents for free.

The collection includes his notes during the five year voyage of the HMS Beagle during which period Darwin collected fossil and specimen samples and first began to formulate his theory of revolution.

The documents also included the first draft of “Origin of Species” from the 1840s and recipes from his wife Emma’s recipe book.

“Origin of Species” is one of the must read books, even if you don’t agree with his theory it provides valuable insights about evolution of plants and animals in nature.