Charles Darwin’s early beetle collections: ‘Darwin’s beetle box’ and the Down House box

Charles Darwin’s enthusiasm for collecting beetles during his time as a student at the University of Cambridge is well known, and ‘Darwin’s beetle box’ in the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge has been claimed to be his student collection. A collection of beetles at Down House is similarly thought to be Darwin’s collection of British beetles, but is imprecisely dated. Here we compare the species present in the boxes with the annotations in his copy of Stephens’ ‘British Insects’, and other notes, correspondence and specimens. There is a very close match between these sources of information and in the curation of the two boxes, the pins used and the handwritten labels, including some written by Emma Darwin. These similarities and details of correspondence lead us to conclude that most of the contents of both boxes represent the collections made by Charles Darwin in 1829–31, with the addition of one specimen provided by Alfred Russel Wallace in 1866 and two probably from Francis Darwin.