The Charming Doodles Charles Darwin’s Children Left All Over the Manuscript of ‘On the Origin of Species’

"In contemplating family, work, and happiness, Charles Darwin proclaimed: “Children are one’s greatest happiness, but often & often a still greater misery. A man of science ought to have none.” And yet he and Emma had ten. Adept at weighing the pros and cons of family life with equal parts earnestness and irreverence, he clearly concluded that the happiness far outweighs the misery.

There is no more endearing a testament to how this balance skews — to both the exuberant happiness that children bring and the benign misery of the innocent waywardness — than the doodles Darwin’s children left on the back-leaves and in the margins of his Origin of Species manuscript draft, recently digitized by the American Museum of Natural History in collaboration with the Cambridge University Library. "

 

see the gallery by Maria Popova​

The Charming Doodles Charles Darwin’s Children Left All Over the Manuscript of ‘On the Origin of Species’ – Brain Pickings