Mystery surrounds the return of two ‘stolen’ notebooks used by Charles Darwin in the 1830s, 22 years after they were last seen.
The small leather-bound books, said to be worth many millions of pounds and which include the scientist’s famous ‘tree of life’ sketch, were found last month in a pink gift bag that had been left outside Cambridge University librarian Dr Jessica Gardner’s office.
The notebooks, enclosed in clingwrap, but still in their original box, were placed in an envelope bearing the words: ‘Librarian, Happy Easter X’.
The BBC reports that their return comes 15 months after the broadcaster first highlighted that the notebooks had gone missing and the library launched a worldwide appeal to find them.
The manuscripts were last seen in November 2000 after ‘an internal request’ to remove them from the library’s special collections strongroom to be photographed.
It was only during a routine check two months later that they were found to be missing. Initially, librarians thought they had been put back in the wrong place in the vast university library, which contains more than 10 million books, maps and manuscripts.
But despite various searches, the notebooks never turned up, and in 2020 Dr Gardner concluded they had probably been stolen. She called in the police and informed Interpol.
The tree of life sketch contained in the notebooks was central to Darwin’s developing the theory of evolution.
The notepads date from the late 1830s after Darwin had returned from the Galapagos Islands. (He visited Cape Town on the home leg of the voyage.) On one page, he drew a spindly sketch of a tree, which helped inspire his theory of evolution and, more than 20 years later, would become a central theory in his ground-breaking work, On the Origin of Species.
Jim Secord, emeritus professor of history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University, said: ‘The theory of natural selection and evolution is probably the single most important theory in the life and earth environmental sciences and these are the notebooks in which that theory was put together.
‘They’re some of the most remarkable documents in the whole history of science.’
Police are still investigating, hoping to identify who returned the notebooks.