Most Darwin texts on the internet 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. An example are the many online 'first editions' of Darwin's Origin of Species. Often these cannot be correct as the text contains the phrase 'survival of the fittest'—famously coined by Herbert Spencer and first included in the 5th edition of 1869. Many other online copies of the Origin purport to be the first edition yet contain the 'Historical Sketch', first found in Britain in the 3rd edition of 1861. Most historical texts on the internet contain silent additions or omissions—footnotes are changed to endnotes or formatting altered without informing readers where this has been done. If scholars are to find digital texts more useful, it must be perfectly clear which historical text is represented and the text must be useable and citable in conventional ways. The texts provided here are an attempt to do so for the writings of Darwin. The site also provides many more Darwin texts than are available anywhere else—in fact almost the complete works. View the list of Darwin's works available: Darwin's writings. See also Related texts.
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