CHAPTER XI 



DARWIN 



CHARLES Robert Darwin was born in 1809 at Shrewsbury in the west 

 of England. His father, Robert Waring Darwin, was the son of the 

 physician and natural philosopher Erasmus Darwin and was him- 

 self a physician. He was married to Susannah Wedgwood, daughter of the 

 famous procelain manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood, who, from being a poor 

 and ignorant apprentice to a potter had made a successful career, acquiring 

 a splendid fortune and a famous name in the history of ceramics. Charles 

 was the sixth out of eight children. He went through a school of the usual 

 English type, his education consisting almost exclusively of the classical 

 languages, and was afterwards sent to Edinburgh in order to study medicine 

 in the family tradition. The Latin he learnt at school did not interest him 

 very much and he was utterly bored by the anatomy lectures. Darwin broke 

 off his medical studies after a couple of years, so that he never became an 

 anatomist, to his own great loss. He now decided to try his hand at theology 

 at Cambridge, where he spent three years and took his degree of bachelor of 

 arts, but he spent most of his time pursuing the usual occupation of the 

 well-to-do English undergraduate — sport, especially shooting. He also col- 

 lected insects and plants for his own amusement, but he chiefly interested 

 himself in geology, receiving a sound elementary training in that subject 

 under the guidance of the eminent professor Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873), 

 whom he accompanied on several expeditions. On the recommendation of 

 a friend he was offered in 1831 the unsalaried post of naturalist on board 

 the cruiser Beagle, which was to circumnavigate the world for mainly carto- 

 graphical purposes. This voyage, which lasted five years, gave him, as he 

 himself says, his real training as a naturalist, as it also determined the di- 

 rection that his future work was to take. He worked with zeal and sent home 

 from the various stopping-places on the way both notes and collections. 

 Of these the geological possessed the greatest value; the zoological and 

 botanical were regarded by contemporary judges as nothing extraordinary. 

 This persevering activity was so much the more praiseworthy as Darwin 

 suffered throughout the journey from incurable seasickness, which gradually 

 irremediably impaired his health. On his return home he devoted himself 

 for years to the working up of the natural objects and the material for ideas 

 that he had gathered in the course of the voyage. During that period there 



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