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October Issue |
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Resources |
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A NATURALIST'S LIFE JOURNEY
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22777 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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8 / 1999 |
742 Words |
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Peter W. Graham
Peter W. Graham, Clifford A. Cutchins Professor of English at
Virginia Tech, studies British literature and culture. His
book titles include Byron's Bulldog, Don Juan and Regency
England, Articulating the Elephant Man, and The Portable
Darwin. |
Charles Darwin was the second son and fifth of six children in the family of Dr. Robert Darwin and his wife, Susannah Wedgwood. From birth, he was securely situated in the most prosperous and progressive stratum of the British ruling class. His grandfathers, the doctor-poet Erasmus Darwin and the famous potter Josiah Wedgwood, belonged to the freethinking Lunar Society of Birmingham, and his father was one of the most successful medical practitioners of the day.
After his mother's death in 1817, Darwin was reared by elder sisters when he was home from nearby Shrewsbury School, where the classical regime of Greek and Latin offered little to interest a boy fond of country pastimes: hunting, shooting, collecting insects. In 1825, Charles was sent to join his elder brother Erasmus in studying medicine at Edinburgh University, home to Britain's most distinguished medical faculty. There Darwin enjoyed his informal study of natural history but loathed the medical curriculum.
Thereupon, his father's plan shifted, and Darwin enrolled at Cambridge to pursue studies that would qualify him for the life of a country clergyman. Darwin did what was necessary to pass his exams but devoted himself to sporting pastimes, competitive beetle-hunting, and cultivation of Cambridge faculty with scientific interests: particularly geologist Adam Sedgwick and botanist John Stevens Henslow.
Through Henslow's intervention, Darwin was offered in 1826 the post of unpaid naturalist and gentleman companion to Captain Fitzroy on HMS Beagle—a small, rebuilt ship bound on what would be a five-year circumnavigating voyage. The Beagle's mission was coastal surveying, but its momentous side effect was its role in transforming our view of the world by offering young Darwin what he would later call "by far the most important event in my life."
As the ship sailed down the eastern side of South America, around the tip of desolate, storm-wracked Tierra del Fuego, and up the coast of Chile, Darwin frequently disembarked to explore and collect biological and geological specimens.
He found the luxuriant Brazilian rain for est "a chaos of delight," discovered the bones of a Megatherium that created a sensation on arrival in London, marveled at the difference between the "savage" Fuegians and "civilized man," rode across the pampas, and climbed the Andes. In the volcanic Galapagos archipelago, he encountered species of tortoises, mockingbirds, and finches that varied from island to island.
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