Before the Beagle, young Darwin was a bored medical student and beetle hunter
The man who explained how species change nearly became a country parson. Charles Darwin found medical lectures dull and surgery distressing, preferred riding and shooting at Cambridge, and joined a dining club devoted to eating unfamiliar animals. What saved his scientific career was an obsession with collecting and a well-timed letter.
Darwin grew up in Shrewsbury, fifth of six children of a wealthy doctor, and both of his grandfathers, Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood, campaigned against slavery. Erasmus had even toyed with ideas of gradual development and common descent in a long poem, notions his grandson would later make rigorous. Sent to Edinburgh to study medicine in 1825, Charles neglected his courses but took about forty hour-long lessons in taxidermy from John Edmonstone, a freed Black man from Demerara. He also helped the zoologist Robert Grant study marine invertebrates and, at 18, showed that black spores in oyster shells were in fact the eggs of a skate leech.
His irritated father moved him to Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1828 to prepare for the Church. There a second cousin, William Darwin Fox, got him hooked on beetles, and some of his finds appeared in print. The botanist John Stevens Henslow became his mentor, so much so that dons called Darwin the man who walks with Henslow. Buckling down before exams, he placed tenth among 178 candidates for the ordinary degree in January 1831, and read works by William Paley, John Herschel and Alexander von Humboldt that shaped his sense of what science could be.
That summer Henslow recommended him as an unpaid gentleman naturalist aboard HMS Beagle, bound to chart the South American coast. Darwin's father thought the trip a waste of time until his brother-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood II, talked him round. The voyage began on 27 December 1831 and lasted almost five years, and Darwin spent most of it ashore.
Early discoveries shook him. On Cape Verde he spotted seashells in a band high up a volcanic cliff, persuading him that Charles Lyell was right about land slowly rising and falling. In Patagonia he dug up bones of enormous extinct mammals, including Megatherium, lying beside modern shells. Riding with gauchos, he noticed that two kinds of rhea occupied separate but overlapping ranges. Years later, in 1838, puzzles like these led him to natural selection.
Source: Charles Darwin
