If you don't look at anything else - look at this

The complete evolutionary works of Charles Darwin, one of my heroes, has gone online, including the stolen notebook he carried in his pocket around the Galapagos Islands.

Tens of thousands of pages of text and pictures and audio files are available, including some previously unpublished manuscripts and diaries of the great man – who more than anyone transformed the world of science.

The notebook used during the Beagle voyage which would later forge his scientific arguments is fascinating because of the domestic incidents rather than the scientific import. According to Reuters it was stolen in the 1980s, but Darwin's great-great-grandson hopes the publication online, thanks to a transcription from a microfilm copy made two decades earlier, will persuade whoever has it to return it.

Other items in the free collection of 50,000 pages and 40,000 images are the first editions of the Journal of Researchers, written in 1839, The Descent of Man, The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle, which includes his observations during his five-year trip to the Amazon, Patagonia and the Pacific, and the first five editions of the Origin of Species.

Absolutely brilliant. I wonder what he would have made of all this internet malarkey.

Anyway that’s it from me for the next week – I’m off to Sicily sans Blackberry and the internet.