Charles Robert Darwin was born at Shrewsbury, England, in 1809, the son of a well-to-do doctor. His mother died in 1817 when Charles was eight years old. In the following year he was sent to Shrewsbury School, where, to all accounts he was below average in all his subjects. Despite this failure to shine academically at school, as a young child Darwin developed an interest in the natural world becoming a keen collector of bird's eggs, insects and preserved fossils. From 1825 to 1827 Darwin went to Edinburgh University to follow the family tradition and train as a doctor. Although he gained a degree in medicine Darwin decided against doctoring as a profession due mainly to the fact that he hated seeing illness and he couldn't stand the sight of blood! His Edinburgh years however were significant for, not only did he meet and become friends with Dr Robert Grant, a pioneer evolutionist, sixteen years his senior, (a man who stimulated his interest in rocks and fossils) he gained invaluable knowledge and experience by attending lectures on biology, zoology and chemistry, and learned the skills of taxidermy.
On graduating in 1831, due to the influence of Henslow, Darwin was offered a position of naturalist on a ship, HMS Beagle, which was about to set off on a voyage to chart the South American coast. After a delay of several months, during which he overcame the disapproval of his father and while the ship was being refitted, the Beagle finally set sail at Christmas of that year setting a course for the Canary Islands; Cape Verde then taking the trade winds to Brazil and Argentina. Stopping for a time at Patagonia Darwin collected several significant fossil remains. The Beagle then set sail for the stormy waters of the Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn, and then returned to Beunos Aires, thus allowing him more time to explore. As he examined the rocks of the Argentinian hinterland he discovered more fossil remains of animals which resembled creatures living today but larger, different and extinct. When faced with such evidence he came to the conclusion that creation was a continuous process and that it had been going on for a long time. Certainly not a single week as stated in the book of Genesis.
John Edmonstone
John was a freed black slave from Guyana, South America, who made his living in Edinburgh teaching University students the art of taxidermy. He lived at 37 Lothian Street in Edinburgh, just a few doors down from where Charles Darwin and his brother, Erasmus, lived. John learned his trade from Charles Waterton, an early 1800's British naturalist.
While Darwin was a student at Edinburgh University he hired John to teach him taxidermy. The two of them often sat together for conversation and John would fill Darwin's head with vivid pictures of the tropical rain forests of South America. These pleasant conversations with John may have later inspired Darwin to dream about exploring the tropics. In any event, the taxidermy skills Darwin learned from him were indispensable during his voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle in 1831.
The Beagle continued on its journey. On entering the calmer waters of the Pacific ocean the ship called in at Valparaiso, Chile, where Darwin undertook a six week tour of the Andes. It was while walking in these mountains, at an altitude of 12,000ft, that Darwin found a bed of fossil seashells. This puzzled the young botanist as these fossils had clearly been formed under the sea yet they were found at such a great height above sea level. Totally opposing the prevailing view held by the Creationists that fossil remains like these were found at such a great height because they had been left there by the flood of Genesis, Darwin concluded that they had been marine creatures living and dying in the sea and the rock formed containing such shells had been pushed upwards by tremendous earth movements long ago. HMS beagle sailed on and reached the Galapagos Islands on 17 September 1835. Here Darwin encountered a host of rare, fascinating if not extraordinary creatures including giant tortoises and Iguanas. It came to Darwin's notice how the majority of birds, reptiles, shells and plants he collected were unique, found only on those islands and nowhere else. In an attempt to explain such variations within one species Darwin rejected the traditional idea of "fixity" - that creation had been instantaneous and fixed - and argued that the animal kingdom had evolved from something very primitive to something complex, and this change was still taking place. Each creature, he reasoned, would change or adapt according to the environment in which it lived and the food available
Darwin was not unique when he set sail in the Beagle. Indeed Darwin was one of many Victorians who travelled to remote parts of the world in the name of science and exploration. It was not neutral science and exploration, of course, it was frequently in the service of the state or in the interests of capital - in this period 'naval power, science and empire converged with superb economy'. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were marked by the growth of science and exploration and the emergence of learned institutions and societies, for example, the Linnean Society (founded 1788), the Royal Society (1799), the Geological Society of London (1807), the Zoological Society of London (1826), the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1831), the Entomological Society (1833), the Edinburgh Botanical Society (1836), the Ethnological Society of London (1843), the Meteorological Office (1845) - with which Robert Fitz Roy was closley associated, and many more again. These societies all needed specimens and were filled with anxious scientists ready to explore, catalogue, record and examine these specimens: 'the Victorian naturalist's first duty was to shoot and trap and skin and stuff and pickle, fulfilling through capture and slaughter the role of an imperial Adam'.
It was as if these societies and their members attempted to 'classify every existing plant, animal and insect' and no part of the globe was spared a systematic and thorough exploration. Africa was explored by Mungo Park, Richard Lander and Heinrich Barth and even, Darwin's cousin Francis Galton. The Amazon, which made such an impression of Darwin, had been explored by Henry Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace, and Darwin's friend and confidant, Joseph Hooker (1817-1911), had explored the Antarctic, Australasia, Africa and the Himalayas in search of plants, and another of Darwin's friends, Thomas Henry Huxley had sailed as ships surgeon to Australia (and acted as naturalist). Alfred Russel Wallace spent 1854-1862 in the Malay Archipelago and there, contemporaneously with Charles Darwin, discovered evolution through means of natural selection.
The world was shrinking therefore through the efforts of these and other men and the excitement they engendered. The Victorian era also threw up its eccentric explorers, none more peculiar than Mary Kingsley who sallied forth around Africa in everyday English clothes, including parasol, as if she were in Green Park, London. She also wrote the very popular Travels in West Africa (1897). Travel and the exploits of scientists and explorers permanently changed Victorian Britain and its culture. Arthur Conan Doyle's stories of Sherlock Holmes, for example, are filled with the exotic and the foreign, not surprising since Doyle had been surgeon on ships which sailed to both the Arctic and to Africa. The literature of the late Victorian era is indeed suffused with the effects of this opening up of the world: Rider Haggard's stories of Africa, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Charles Kingsley's Water Babies, Samuel Butler's Erewhon all typify the Victorian world changed by the many contacts with the previously unknown world and its innumerable cultures
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