 So as I've said, the focus of the collection really is on the mathematical and technological sciences but we also have a number of really interesting and important things in the biological or natural sciences and I've gathered some of those things here on the table. So this first, this is from 1859, this is the first time that the theory of natural selection, which is sort of the cornerstone of evolutionary biology appeared in print and we all know that Darwin is most often credited with the discovery of the theory of natural selection and eventually the science of evolution but he also had, he actually had a co-discoverer, Alfred Russell Wallace, who was another naturalist working contemporarily with Darwin, was about a generation younger than Darwin, also came to discover that natural selection was in fact happening in the habitats that he spent most of his time in doing fieldwork. So when Darwin found out through a friend that Wallace had sort of come up with a version of the theory that he had really been sitting on for, you know, close to 20 years, he reached out and they decided to publish sort of a synopsis of their theory together in a joint paper and that appears in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, which was an organization, scientific organization that Darwin and Wallace were both associated with. So, you know, they share credit but Wallace is sort of generous in conceding that Darwin had the priority and in fact we know that he had priority based on some of his manuscripts that survive in England where he actually had taken notes about the theory of natural selection as early as 1837 and wrote a pretty full account of his theory in 1839 that he shared with his friend Charles Lyall. But nevertheless, right, when you read this article closely, it's pretty short, it's only 15 pages, you see that Darwin is really kind of taking pains to apologize for the kind of preliminary nature of his writing on the subject. You know, on the first page, there's a footnote and he says, you know, this manuscript work was never intended for publication and therefore was not written with care. He signs it CD 1858. So, you can see that he's a little bit anxious about how he's not quite ready to present, you know, the full articulation of his theory. But nevertheless, he was willing to publish with Wallace and I think that just goes to show that Darwin was incredibly generous and believed in sort of open sharing of ideas of data in science at this period in the 1850s. So, you know, the first part is a letter. This is again trying to frame the piece to establish priority for Darwin. The first piece is a letter signed by Charles Lyall and Joseph Hooker, who was another botanist, naturalist and Darwin's closest friend, where they're basically saying, you know, hey, we've been in correspondence with Darwin for a number of years and we know that he's been working on this theory for a couple of decades. So again, sort of staking that claim that Darwin was the first to arrive at it. But then you have, you know, first Wallace's paper and then you have an extract from Darwin's manuscript that would become The Origin of Species published in 1859. So I just wanted to share this because while many people think that natural selection evolution was introduced in The Origin of Species, it actually was in this fairly modest 15 page co-authored paper that Darwin and Wallace presented together. So they read this paper to the Linnean Society in 1858, I think July, 1858. And then Darwin sort of returned to his manuscript and worked feverishly to finish it for publication. And eventually that became The Origin of Species published in November, 1859. So we actually have three copies of The Origin of Species at Carnegie Mellon. This copy here that's on the pillow actually belongs to the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation. And I point up because they're on the fifth floor of Hunt Library where I am right now. But we also have a copy that's in the Poser Memorial Collection and another copy that's just in our General Special Collections collection. So that's significant in itself that we have three copies of this really monumental work in the first edition, in the first date, you know, in one building essentially. So this, as I said, this is The Origin of Natural Selection, of the Science of Evolutionary Biology, but it's also the origin of the entire scientific discipline of biogeography. And basically that's the study of, you know, observing and marking how the landscape habitat affects the sort of ecosystem of living things, right? That was Darwin and Wallace's observation that, you know, species evolve to fit, you know, habitats, niches in a particular ecosystem. And I think they were the first to really see that this involved a fairly delicate balance, right? So if you take away the ecosystem, if you take away the landscape, the species, right, the living, the fauna will suffer. And that's kind of represented in a diagram. It's the only illustration that appears in Darwin's Origin of Species in the fourth chapter. And this is, it's kind of looks familiar to us, but at the time this was pretty new and radical. This is what's called a phylogenetic tree. And it just is meant to show in the form of a diagram the relationship between species through time. And that was, you know, that's the basic argument of evolutionary biology that species evolve to fit kind of the conditions in which, you know, they exist. But this image in particular, I think encapsulates why Darwin is so interesting and really still insistent today. Because, you know, we know now that that balance between environment and species and living things is incredibly fragile. And if you affect either side of that equation, you know, you could potentially, it potentially leads to really deleterious results. So that's just a fascinating diagram in its own right in the history of science. You know, this is, as I've said, it's, it's something that we're now familiar with, but at the time it was really new. And I'll just close this there. I guess the other point that I want to make about our copies of Darwin is the importance of having multiple copies of the same book in one place. You know, from our perspective, we're familiar with the idea that, you know, copies of a particular book are more or less identical and exchangeable as such. But that's not usually not the case with historical books, because in the process of printing, changes might have been made. So you end up finding variants in different copies. So it very well might be, I haven't looked closely, but it may very well might be that these three copies that we have at Carnegie Mellon have variants of Darwin's language that would be significant to a scholar working on, you know, the first publication of the Origin of Species. And there's actually a really good example of that in the Posner copy, which is inscribed. It's a presentation copy from Darwin. So Darwin has written on the front fly leaf, you know, from the author to John Morris Herbert, 16th November 1859. So that's significant in itself, right? This particular copy has a provenance that links it to Darwin's friend, John Morris Herbert. And Darwin and Herbert were actually school friends together at Cambridge, and they would take, you know, sort of day trips out into the fields of the English countryside to collect beetles and other entomological specimens. And there's a possibility that the first inkling of Darwin's thought on the theory of natural selection might have been formed in those trips that he took with Herbert. So, you know, it's a significant copy because it has that association from, you know, Darwin's youth. The other reason why this inscription is really significant is the date, right? We know that copies were sent to booksellers in late November, probably November 24th, 1859, but this is dated 16 November. So we can be sure, given this presentation and inscription, that this is one of the earliest copies to sort of come off the press, right? And that's important, you know, if you're studying the history of the text. That's just one example of why it's important to collect sometimes in multiples, just so you can capture that level of detail that's really only available, you know, in individual copies. And you lose that if you only have one.