Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin was born at Shrewsbury in England in 1809 into a wealthy doctor's family; his grandfather Erasmus Darwin was also a naturalist. He studied medicine at Edinburgh but gave it up because he could not bear to watch operations, then studied for the Church at Cambridge, meaning to become a country parson, though his heart was in collecting beetles. At twenty-two he sailed as naturalist aboard HMS Beagle and spent five years circling the world, collecting a great many specimens in South America, the Galápagos and Australia and beginning to think about the origin of species. On his return he settled at Down in Kent, often ill, and worked for more than twenty years with astonishing patience. In 1858 he received a paper from Alfred Russel Wallace setting out a theory remarkably like his own, and the next year he hurried On the Origin of Species into print. He is buried in Westminster Abbey, close to Newton.