Sam Noble Museum Blog

Cover of The Voyage of the Beagle

Our exhibits team is hard at work these days, preparing to mount two special exhibitions at the museum on October 10. One of them I have mentioned here before: Drawing the Motmot, a collection of artwork by Debby Kaspari. The other I have not yet talked about. It’s Darwin at the Museum, and features the complete set of first editions of Darwin’s books, courtesy of the University of Oklahoma Libraries History of Science Collection.

Charles Darwin is, of course, a hot topic this year. It is both the 200th anniversary of his birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his most famous book: On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, 1859, in which he laid out the framework for his theory of evolution by natural selection.

Now, I’m no biologist, but I have to admit that the first time I heard about this exhibit I was a little underwhelmed. Books? Really? But I’m here today to get you as jazzed up about this exhibition as I have become.

Darwin was not always the dowdy old guy with a white beard that we think of today. In his time, he was quite the dashing adventurer. Imagine the romantic figure he must have cut following his five year voyage around the world on the siling vessel the Beagle in the 19th century. FIVE YEARS.  On a ship.  Sailing the seven seas, exploring parts of the world that were virtually unknown.  He must have been all the social rage when he returned, full of swashbuckling stories of faraway places and the strange and exotic people and animals that inhabit them.

From what I understand, The Voyage of the Beagle, in which Darwin describes his experiences during the journey, was a Victorian era bestseller, and for good reason. Though the first edition was unillustrated, a second edition was later produced that was chock full of gorgeous color illustrations of the animals, people and landscapes Darwin had encountered along the way. The pictures were produced by some of the top scientific illustrators of the time and each one was hand colored.  (The illustrations will be shown as a slide presentation on a flat-screen television in the exhibition.) These images must have been something like National Geographic’s most famous photos for their time.  People all over the world would have been poring over these pictures of wonderful exotic animals.  It’s likely the illustrated version of the Voyage was a well-thumbed parlor show-piece in many homes.  People probably discussed it over polite dinners.  Young would-be explorers probably turned over the pages and dreamed of being a scientist adventurer themselves someday.  Perhaps little boys played at being Charles Darwin, swinging make-believe bolas over their heads as they road with the imaginary gauchos – the South American version of cowboys –  in their back yards.

An illustration of a falkland fox from Voyage of the Beagle

And if that’s not enough to get you interested in Darwin in a whole new way, take a look at the list of books he published in his lifetime.  We think of Darwin as a biologist and naturalist.  But he started out as a geologist, and his interests ran the gamut from geology to biology to the expression of emotion in animals.  His works include books on the structure of coral reefs, geological observations of volcanic islands and South America, how orchids are fertilised by insects, variations in domestic plants and animals, insectivorous plants, the power of movement in plants, earthworms, barnacles, and of course, the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex and On the Origin of Species.  The sheer scope of the books is worth looking at.

The exhibit will include a complete traditional costume such as those worn by the gauchos of South America (they’re pictured in Voyage of the Beagle in the process of hunting  rheas  – large flightless birds similar to emus – with bolas).  There will also be specimens from our museum collections of animals mentioned in Darwin’s works.

A model of the HMS Beagle under construction for the exhibition "Darwin at the Museum"

The exhibition will also feature a beautifully crafted model of the Beagle itself.  The ship is being built by a professional team of model makers and should make a really lovely centerpiece to the exhibition.  Darwin’s career, after all, really took off after his trip aboard the Beagle.  It was the grand scope of that experience that provided Darwin with the Big Picture of the diversity of life on the planet.  Laurie Vitt, the museum’s curator of reptiles and one of the co-developers of the Darwin at the Museum exhibit, said:  “Any biologist would have a difficult time following the route that Darwin followed and not being stunned by the diversity.  Any biologist would think ‘what causes that?’ With a little bit of geology the questions started to stand out. It was the impact of Darwin’s voyage to South America that started him thinking of the causes of the diversity of organisms.”

There’s a great diversity to Darwin himself, as well.  And we hope this exhibition will help open it up to our museum visitors.