Georges Montbard
Darwin in the ‘Gallery of Ancestors’

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection is fundamental to our understanding of human development. This caricature of him is by a French artist escaping to England from the Paris Commune in 1871, the same year Descent of man was published. The Library holds over 95% of Darwin’s surviving manuscripts and it was in the University that revolutionary discoveries in the structure of DNA and in mapping of the human genome were made, bringing the exhibition up to the present day.