Today I went to the Boston Museum of Science to a workshop. The morning speaker I heard was great- but what I really got a kick out of was the Darwin exhibit. The photo on the right is Darwin in his old age- he died in his early 70's but he looks so ancient compared to people today. Anyhow- at the exhibit- They had lots of his actual specimens from when he took a 5 year voyage on the Beagle. Actual specimens- from the 1830's. Plants mounted under glass, a few fossils. Labeled by him. They had some of his tools- a magnifying glass, a rock chipper- to think his hands were actually was wore down the newness off the handles. And lots of his journals and letters- a little sketch of an evolutionary tree in 1. (See photo). The other photo was one they had at the exhibit too- an old daguerreotype of Darwin and his first son.Plus, there's this PBS series called Evolution- and the first film in this series is about Darwin, where actors play the roles of different people in his life. Well in 1 movie scene- his brother Erasmus finds his journal with the lists of whether to marry or not to marry. (The gal was his cousin Emma Wedgewood by the way.) Well they had that actual journal pages there- one side was titled why he should marry and the other side was why he shouldn't. His microscope was there too, in a small reincarnation of his study/lab at Down House where he lived. There were also the caption's journal from his trip on the Beagle, a first edition of his Origin of Species-writings of Malthus (the guy who said the world could only make enough food to feed so many people) and Alfred Russell Wallace (a guy who took a long ocean voyage also and came to the same conclusion as Darwin, which forced Darwin to publish since he had already come up with his idea- but was shy about presenting it. Interesting how he was rather an odd duck so to speak, yet a genius, and also how he hated controversy.
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