Darwin, CHARLES ROBERT, naturalist, the discoverer of the principle of natural selection, was born at Shrewsbury, February 12, 1809. His grandfather was Dr Erasmus Darwin, and his father Dr Robert W. Darwin, F.R.S. His mother was a daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the celebrated potter. Darwin was educated at Shrewsbury grammar-school, studied at Edinburgh University for two sessions in 1825–6–7, and entered at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1828. Already at Edinburgh he had become a member of the local Plinian Society; he took part in its natural history excursions, and read before it his first scientific paper—a new contribution to our knowledge of the Flustra or sea-mats. It was at Cambridge, however, that his biological studies seriously began. Here he became acquainted with Professor Henslow, the well-known botanist, who encouraged his interest in botany and zoology. His chief taste at this time was for geological research. In 1831 he took his degree of B.A., and shortly after was recommended by Henslow as naturalist to the expedition of H.M.S. Beagle, under Captain (afterwards Admiral) Fitzroy, R.N., then about to start for a scientific survey of South American waters. He sailed on December 27, 1831, and did not return to England from his long cruise till October 2, 1836. Meanwhile he visited Teneriffe, the Cape de Verde Islands, the Brazilian coast, Monte Video, Tierra del Fuego, Buenos Ayres, Valparaiso, and the Chilian region, the Galapagos Archipelago, Tahiti, New Zealand, Tasmania, and the Keeling Islands, in which last he laid the foundation for his famous theory of coral reefs. It was during this long expedition that Darwin obtained that intimate knowledge of the fauna, flora, and geological conditions of many tropical, subtropical, and temperate climates which so admirably equipped him at last for the great task he was afterwards to perform in settling the factors of biological evolution.
On his return to England in 1836, he set to work to co-ordinate the results obtained during his voyage. He formed the friendship of Sir Charles Lyell and other scientific leaders, by whose aid he was appointed secretary of the Geological Society in 1838. A year later, he was elected to the fellowship of the Royal Society, and early in 1839 he married his cousin, Miss Wedgwood. In the same year he published his Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the various Countries visited by H.M.S. Beagle. From 1840 to 1843 Darwin was occupied with the publication of the Zoology of the
Voyage of the Beagle, under government auspices, to which great work (compiled by the leading specialist authorities of the day) he himself contributed an introduction and many notes. In 1842 appeared his work on The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs; in 1844, Geological Observations on Volcanic Islands; and in 1846, Geological Observations on South America. These works placed him at once in the front rank of contemporary scientific thinkers. In 1851-53 appeared his valuable treatise on barnacles, A Monograph of the Cirripedia.
Three years after his marriage Darwin settled at Down, near Beckenham, in Kent, where for the rest of his days he passed his time as a country gentleman among his conservatories, his pigeons, his garden, and his fowls. The practical information thus gained (especially as regards variation and interbreeding) was of invaluable use to him in his later researches. Private means enabled him to devote himself unremittingly henceforth, in spite of continuous and distressing ill-health, to the pursuit of science. It was at Down that Darwin began to occupy himself with the great work of his life—the problem of the origin of species. In 1837 he had already set out to accumulate facts and observations for this purpose. After five years' unremitting work, he 'allowed himself to speculate' on the subject, and drew up some short notes, which he enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of conclusions for his own use. These conclusions embodied in embryo the famous principle of natural selection, the germ of the celebrated Darwinian Theory (q.v.). With constitutional caution, however, Darwin delayed publication of his hypothesis, which was only at length precipitated many years later by an accidental circumstance of a romantic character. In 1858 Mr Alfred Russel Wallace, the distinguished explorer, sent home from the Malay Archipelago a memoir addressed to Darwin himself, for presentation to the Linnean Society. On opening this packet, Darwin found to his surprise that it contained in essence the main idea of his own theory of natural selection. Sir Charles Lyell and Sir Joseph Hooker, to whom he communicated the facts, persuaded Darwin to read a paper of his own concomitantly with Wallace's before the Linnean Society, which was accordingly done on July 1, 1858. Urged forward by this strange coincidence, Darwin set to work seriously at once to condense his vast mass of notes—the labour of a lifetime—and put into shape his great work on The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, published in November 1859. For an account of the main ideas there promulgated, see DARWINIAN THEORY. The book itself, an epoch-making work, was received throughout Europe with the deepest interest, was violently attacked and energetically defended, but in the end succeeded in obtaining recognition (with or without certain reservations) from almost all competent biologists. From the day of its publication Darwin continued to work on unremittingly at a great series of supplemental treatises, in which his main principles were still further enforced and enlarged, while minor corollaries were brought prominently into view. The Fertilisation of Orchids appeared in 1862, The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication in 1867, and The Descent of Man in 1871. The last-named work, hardly less famous than the Origin of Species, derives the human race from a hairy quadrumanous animal belonging to the great anthropoid group, and related to the progenitors of the orangutan, chimpanzee, and gorilla. In this book Darwin also developed his important supplementary theory of sexual selection, which on the whole has been received by scientific thinkers with less favour than his other ideas. His later works are The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1873), Insectivorous Plants (1875), Climbing Plants (1875), The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom (1876), Different Forms of Flowers in Plants of the same Species (1877), and The Power of Movement in Plants (1880). His last work, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of Worms, appeared in 1881. In it Darwin showed grounds for believing that the vegetable mould which covers a large part of the globe is mainly due to the castings of earth-worms, without which the greater portion of the land surface of the world must necessarily consist of barren rock or thirsty sand.
It is, however, as the great leader of evolutionary biology that Darwin will be mainly remembered among men. Though not (as is commonly, but erroneously, believed) himself the originator of the evolution hypothesis, nor even the first to apply the conception of descent with modification to plant and animal organisms, Darwin was undoubtedly the first thinker to gain for that conception a wide acceptance among biological experts. By adding to the crude evolutionism of Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, and others, his own specific idea of natural selection, he supplied to the idea a sufficient cause, which raised it at once from the level of a hypothesis to the grade of a verifiable theory. His kindness of character, honesty of purpose, devotion to truth, and attachment to his friends, rendered him no less remarkable on the moral and emotional than on the purely intellectual side of his nature. For many years his health had been extremely feeble, and he had worked under the severest physical disadvantages. He died suddenly, after a very short illness, April 19, 1882, and was buried with unusual honours in Westminster Abbey. See his Life and Letters by his son, Francis Darwin (1887).