![]() Fortunately, it was photocopied by Clifton College and a photograph was printed in the auction catalogue. It was later sold at auction in 1999 for £39,500 to an anonymous buyer “in the Americas” and has never been seen again. It was purchased anonymously by cotton merchant and aviation pioneer Sir Alfred Paton who donated it to his old school, Clifton College. For example, one was donated by Darwin’s daughter Henrietta Litchfield to a Red Cross auction during WWI for the war wounded. This collection of draft pages includes unprecedented details about each sheet and its history. This launch of the drafts by Darwin scholar, Dr John van Wyhe from the NUS Department of Biological Sciences, includes seven draft pages not found in previous lists with three draft pages recently rediscovered – bringing the total to 59. So far, about 50 sheets were known to survive. The United Kingdom’s Minister for Arts, Heritage and Tourism placed an export bar on Darwin’s manuscript, due to its cultural and national significance, in hopes of keeping it in the country. The last one to sell at auction, in 2018, went for £490,000 (approximately USD$ 600,000). Today, the rough drafts of Darwin’s Origin of species are some of the most precious and valuable pieces of paper in the history of science worth almost a million dollars each. ![]() These draft pages are now dispersed around the world and some have probably been lost forever. Some were rescued from the piles of scrap paper and old notes and, over decades, many were given away as gifts especially by his children after his death. Towards the end of Darwin’s life, his theory of evolution was more widely accepted and there was intense interest in the original draft of Origin of Species. In the end, almost all of the draft pages were destroyed. ![]() His children used some sheets for drawings and others were torn in half by one of Darwin’s son who used the blank back sides for mathematical exercises. After his book was published, the unsentimental Darwin discarded the hundreds of pages of the original handwritten draft of his epoch-making book into the Darwin family’s scrap paper pile. Newswise - On the 164th anniversary of Charles Darwin's Origin of species, the Darwin Online project at the National University of Singapore (NUS) will launch all the surviving draft pages of one of the most influential scientific books in history.
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