In modified form, Darwin’s scientific discovery remains the foundation of biology, as it provides a unifying logical explanation for the diversity of life.ĭarwin developed his interest in natural history while studying medicine at Edinburgh University, then theology at Cambridge. The fact that evolution occurs became accepted by the scientific community and the general public in his lifetime, while his theory of natural selection came to be widely seen as the primary explanation of the process of evolution in the 1930s, and now forms the basis of modern evolutionary theory. The editors have provided an excellent introduction and notes for this Penguin Classics edition, which also contains maps and appendices, including an essay on scientific geology and the Bible by Robert FitzRoy, Darwin’s friend and captain of the Beagle.Ĭharles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist, eminent as a collector and geologist, who proposed and provided scientific evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors through the process he called natural selection. As well as a profusion of natural history detail, it records many other things that caught Darwin’s eye, from civil war in Argentina to the new colonial settlements of Australia. His journal, reprinted here in a shortened version, is vivid and immediate, showing us a naturalist making patient observations, above all in geology. Even more vitally, it was to set in motion the intellectual currents that culminated in the arrival of The Origin of Species in Victorian drawing-rooms in 1859. It was to last five years and transform him from an amiable and somewhat aimless young man into a scientific celebrity.
When the Beagle sailed out of Devonport on 27 December 1831, Charles Darwin was twenty-two and setting off on the voyage of a lifetime. S/t: Charles Darwin's Journal of Researches
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