Saturday, August 03, 2002
A marvellous new British Library site for scholarly versions of Darwin's writings:
Despite an impressive proliferation of Darwin texts on the internet, almost all exclude essential bibliographical information such as edition, publisher, place of publication, etc. Page numbers are nowhere to be seen. These factors vastly reduce the usefulness of these texts as they cannot be easily cited. It is impossible to know if one is reading a first or sixth edition. ... If scholars are to find digital texts more useful, it must be perfectly clear which historical text is represented and they must be citable in conventional ways. The texts provided here are an attempt to do so for the writings of Darwin.
Accept no substitute.
I've just started reading Darwin's Descent of Man. I started with a download from another site of a couple of chapters of the first edition (1871). I'll be taking succeeding chapters from the BL site, which has the second edition (1882).
