A Brief Introduction About Darwin, Charles Robert

           Darwin, Charles Robert (1809-1882), English naturalist and author, was born at Shrewsbury, Feb. 12, 1809.  His father was Robert Waring Darwin was a distinguished physician, scientist, poet, and originator of a theory of evolution.  After attending Dr. Samuel Butler's school at Shrewsbury from 1818 to 1825, Darwin spent two years at Edinburgh University in the study of medicine, a profession for which he found himself unfitted.  In 1827, he enrolled at Cambridge University and for three years studied for the ministry, toward which he became disciplined.  In 1831, he went on a geological expedition to North Wales.  He was appointed naturalist on the exploration voyage of the naval vessel H.M.S. Beagle, leaving England Dec. 27, 1831, and returning Oct. 2, 1836.  On this voyage Darwin visited Tenerife, the Cape Verde Islands, the Brazilian coast, Argentina, Uruguay, Tierra del Fuego, Chile, the Galapagos Archipelago, Tahiti, New Zealand, Tasmania, and the Keeling Islands.  In the Keeling Islands, he made observations that were the basis for his theory of coral reefs.  The expedition gave him a wide knowledge of fauna, flora, and geology.

           From 1838 to 1841 he was secretary of the Geological Society, London, and wrote The Journal of a Naturalist (1839), Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle (1840), and The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (1842).   In 1839, Darwin had married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood; and, in 1842, the couple moved from London to Down, Kent, which became their permanent home.  The voyage on the Beagle had undermined Darwin's health, and illness hampered him during the remainder of his life.  Having means of his own, he led an isolated and regular life as student and author.

           In 1837, Darwin had started a notebook in which he entered facts concerning the formation of breeds of domestic animals and plants, and about natural selection.  In 1842, he wrote out his first draft on the origin of species, and expanded it in 1844.  He corresponded with Asa Gray, the United States naturalist, in 1855, and sent Gray a letter explaining his views in 1857.  Charles Lyell, author of the widely discussed Principles of Geology (1830-1833), urged him, in 1856, to prepare a third and more extensive treatise.  This revision was only half finished when Darwin received a letter and manuscript, in June 1858, from Alfred Russell.

               Wallace, who was then in the Moluccas.  Wallace asked Darwin to read the manuscript and forward it to Lyell.  In Wallace's essay, Darwin found a complete abstract of his own theory of natural selection.  It was an unusual situation: two  naturalists, working independently of each other had simultaneously developed theories that were identical.   Both had been influenced by Thomas R. Malthus' work on population; both were familiar with Lyell's views on geology, both had studied fauna, flora, and geological formations in island groups, and each had observed widely varying species.  (Colliers' Encyclopedia with Bibliography and Index, Macmillan Education Corporation, 1976, p. 723).