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A worldwide sea voyage aboard HMS Beagle and observations on the Galapagos Islands in particular provided inspiration and much of the data on which he based his theory.
Charles Robert Darwin in 1854, five years prior to the publishing of The Origin of Species
Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England, on February 12, 1809 (coincidentally, the same day as Abraham Lincoln). He was the fifth of six children of Robert and Susannah Darwin (née Wedgwood), and the grandson of Erasmus DarwinErasmus Darwin ( December 12, 1731 April 18, 1802) trained as a physician and wrote extensively on medicine and botany, as well as poetry. Living in Birmingham and Lichfield, England. He was one of the founder members of the Lunar Society. He was a member, and of Josiah WedgwoodThis article is about the eldest Josiah Wedgwood. He also had a son (see Josiah Wedgwood II), grandson and great-grandson (see Josiah Wedgwood, 1st Baron Wedgwood) of the same name. Josiah Wedgwood ( July 12, 1730 January 3, 1795) was an English potter, c. See also Darwin -- Wedgwood familyThe Darwin Wedgwood family was a prominent English family, descended from Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood, the most notable member of which was Charles Darwin. The family contained at least ten Fellows of the Royal Society and several artists and poets.
After finishing school, Darwin studied medicine in Edinburgh in 1825. His dislike for dissection and the brutality of surgery at the time led him to leave the medical school in 1827. Whilst there, however, he was influenced by the Lamarckian Robert Edmund Grant.
His father, unhappy that his younger son had not become a physician and fearing that he would become a "ne'er do well", enrolled him at Christ's College, Cambridge, with the hopes of Charles' eventually becoming a parson. He preferred riding and shooting to studying, but while at Cambridge, he came under the intellectual influence of scientific minds such as William Whewell and John Stevens Henslow which (combined with his interest in collecting beetles, which was encouraged by his cousin, William Darwin Fox) resulted in him pursuing natural history.
After taking his degree with honours, Darwin stayed at Cambridge for further studies in geology, where he proved particularly adept. In the summer of 1831, Darwin worked with the great geologist Adam Sedgwick mapping strata in Wales.
Darwin had planned to visit Madeira with some class-mates upon graduation in 1831. These plans, however, fell through. After Darwin finished his studies, Henslow recommended him for the position of naturalist and gentleman's companion to Robert Fitzroy, the captain of HMS Beagle, which was departing on a five-year expedition to chart the coastline of South America. His father objected to the expedition, thinking it a waste of his son's time, but was eventually persuaded to let him go.
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