790 EVOLUTION AND CONSERVATION Part VI 



Henslow whose encouragement of Darwin was lifelong. In the British scheme 

 of education, students have always been expected to learn and think for them- 

 selves. Darwin was happy in doing this. 



What he termed "the most important event of my life" began in the autumn 

 of 1831, a few months after he was graduated from Cambridge University, at 

 22 years of age. In his student days, he had called himself a naturalist (the old 

 name for ecologist). He now became the official naturalist on the five-year 

 voyage of "the Beagle" (1831-1836) (Fig. 38.9). This was to be an expedi- 

 tion to learn of the plants and animals of South America, its coastal waters and 

 the famous Galapagos Islands, and to visit Africa, Australia and New Zealand. 

 There Darwin saw and lived with plants and animals in their own homes. He 

 felt the urge and press of tropical abundance. In the rain forests, he saw 

 crowded plants reaching for light, heard the deafening hum and clatter of 

 myriads of insects, and on the coral reefs he walked over packed coral animals 

 in numbers beyond thinking. He had already learned to observe and think. He 

 kept voluminous notes of what he had seen and of what he had thought. 



Fig. 38.9. Charles Darwin in his thirty-first year, 1840. From a water color by 

 George Richmond, R.A. On October 2, 1836 Darwin had returned to England 

 after his five-year voyage on "the Beagle" which was the making of the Charles Dar- 

 win that the world was to know. Between 1836 and 1840 ideas about the multi- 

 plicity of kinds of life were coming into his mind. They persisted and in the Origin 

 of Species (1859) brought to the world the fact that human beings are fellow 

 voyagers with other animals in the great kinship of evolution. (Courtesy, West: 

 Charles Darwin, A Portrait. New Haven. Yale University Press, 1938.) 



