Darwin was well accustomed to thinking problems through on the page. He confidently dedicated different notebooks to different intellectual functions: his field notebooks worked as immediate aide-memoires; in his journals, he constructed the narrative of his life’s events and his emotional responses; and in the ‘Red Notebook’ and the lettered notebooks – sometimes known collectively as the ‘transmutation notebooks’ – he gave his imagination free rein, posing questions to himself and recording his train of thought without inhibition (or syntax).
