Darwin: Gentleman Naturalist

Few Victorians are as well-remembered today as Charles Robert Darwin. Born into a wealthy Shropshire gentry family, Darwin grew up amidst wealth, comfort and country sports. An unimpressive student, Darwin vacillated between the prospect of becoming a country physician, like his father, or a clergyman. The advantage to becoming a country parson, as Darwin saw it, would be the freedom to pursue his growing interest in natural history. However, an unforeseen opportunity precluded Darwin's plan of becoming a clergyman. After his student days in Edinburgh and Cambridge, Darwin's connections in 1831 offered him the opportunity of travelling on a survey ship, H.M.S. Beagle, as the captain's gentleman dining companion and as naturalist. The round-the-world journey lasted almost five years. Darwin spent most of these years investigating the geology and life of the lands he visited, especially South America, the Galapagos islands, and pacific coral reefs. Darwin also read the works of men of science like Alexander von Humboldt and the geologist Charles Lyell. Lyell's new book, Principles of Geology (text outside this site), was particularly interesting for Darwin. Lyell argued that the world had been shaped not by great catastrophes like floods but by the processes we see active today: wind, erosion, volcanoes, earthquakes etc. Lyell offered not just a new geology but a new philosophy of science. Slow gradual cumulative change over a long period of time could produce great effects. Visible non-miraculous causes should be preferred when seeking explanations. Darwin had the opportunity to witness all of these forces himself during the Beagle voyage and he became convinced that something like Lyell's method was correct. Darwin also collected organisms of all sorts, as well as unearthing many fossils. He began to speculate on why it was that the species he found as fossils were often extinct in the same region today, but sometimes not. The evidence clearly showed that the environment had sometimes changed. Where had new species come from?