On the Beagle voyage, Darwin recorded events in a series of notebooks. Darwin was on the Galapagos Islands from September 16 through October 20, 1835 and recorded these events in a red field notebook now entitled EH1.17 on pages 18B through 50B. Darwin’s notebooks are available on-line at http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/.

 The data Darwin documented on the finches in the Galapagos Islands is remarkable in that Darwin refers to “beaks” only once on page 34B (see illustration, line 5) and to “finches” only once on page 43B –

 “Small Finc[h] picking from same piece after alights on back”

Not only will the notebook not win a prize for scientific excellence for studying finch beaks, neither will Darwin’s collection of finches from the different islands because the birds from the different islands were mixed together. Darwin never documented any sequential change in beak sizes in the birds collected from the different islands, and acknowledged in his autobiography -

“Unfortunately most of the specimens of the finch tribe were mingled together.”

Darwin’s notebook was eventually transcribed from microfilm by Gordon Chancellor and the transcription was typed and checked against microfilm by Kees Rookmaaker in 2006.

The current whereabouts of Darwin’s EH1.17 notebook is unknown. The notebook was part of the Darwin Collection at Down House and was microfilmed by Cambridge University Library (and sold by Micromethods) in 1969. The notebook has since been missing and was presumably stolen around 1983, or shortly before, and is now registered as stolen property.

While further investigation of the notebook is no longer possible, Darwin’s evidence for the evolution of the finch beak was simply a re-construction based on the emerging theory of evolution by John Gould back in England long after Darwin set-sail from the Galapagos Island in October 1835.

Now, reference to Darwin’s finches should be for historical purposes, and not as evidence for evolution.