Charles Darwin

I was meant for the Church, yet beetles and field-notes diverted me. At Cambridge I walked with John Stevens Henslow and learned to see; Lyell’s new geology taught me to think in years without number. My hands were soon more at home in hedgerows and herbaria than upon sermons.

When Captain FitzRoy offered a berth on the Beagle (1831-36), I took to sea and to perpetual seasickness. Along the coasts of South America I broke rocks, traced raised beaches after an earthquake in Chile, and gathered fossil bones of great extinct mammals near Bahia Blanca. On the Galapagos I noted slight differences among mockingbirds and finches from island to island, not yet guessing their full import.

Back in England, I married Emma, settled at Down, and walked my Sandwalk while ideas fermented. In 1837 I scribbled "I think" above a branching sketch; in 1838, reading Malthus on population, the principle of natural selection occurred to me. I wrote a private sketch (1842) and a longer essay (1844), then spent eight laborious years on barnacles to school myself in variation. I delayed publication until Alfred Russel Wallace’s letter (1858) compelled a joint notice at the Linnean Society; the next year I issued On the Origin of Species.

I have since followed evidence wherever it led: orchids contrived for insect fertilisation, pigeons bred into many forms, the descent of man and the action of sexual selection, the expressions of our emotions, insectivorous plants, and humble earthworms that slowly make the soil beneath our feet. I prefer patience to controversy. If you would question me, bring facts; I shall bring mine.