The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Charles Darwin was born into a life of affluent comfort and high intellectual expectations. He was not expected ever to have to work for a living, but he was expected to be very bright and to use his intelligence well. His paternal grandfather was the poet and natural philosopher Erasmus Darwin; his mater- nal grandfather (and grandfather also of his future wife Emma Wedgewood) was Josiah Wedgewood, wealthy founder of the famous pottery works. Both were part of a large circle of friends and scientific associates that included Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestly. Young Charles, passionately interested in beetles and rocks but not particularly interested in a profession, spent an undistinguished college career at Edinburgh and Cambridge and took holy orders for want of anything better to do. He was just the sort of well-to-do young man likely to be placed, through family influence, in a com- fortable country parsonage to live a bland and blameless life.

Fate intervened in 1831 in the form of Captain Robert FitzRoy, who was about to take the Beagle on a planned two years' voyage to survey the coasts of South America, and who needed an amiable young man, preferably a naturalist, to serve as his companion and messmate—basically to give him the intellectual companionship of someone of his own social class during what promised to be a long and tedious trip. Darwin was chosen, and chose to go, despite the vehement objections of his father; the voyage (which turned out to last five years, not two) changed his life.

He was ready to see the world's natural wonders with an open mind. He had read—devoured—LyelFs path-breaking Principies of Geology; he had participated in discussions at Cambridge speculating about the "transmutation" of species from their original Edenic forms; he was well aware of good reasons to think that fossils were something more than relics of Noah's Flood. On the Beagle's voyage he showed the capacity for hard work that was to distinguish the rest of his life. Whenever the ship touched land Darwin was ashore collecting specimens, observing geological strata, riding on horseback for miles inland and for weeks at a time in search of new material. His own assistant was kept busy preparing bonйs, skins, rocks, and pressed plants, ali of which Darwin shipped back to London by the ton.

Those eventful five years are recounted in Darwin's first popular book, The Voyage of the Beagle, a marvelous blend of scientific reporting and travei writing; the energy, curiosity, and sheer love of life that Darwin experienced during his for- mative voyage shines through on every page. It is a book to be read with pleasure by anyone who has the slightest interest either in the natural world or in world travei, and with pure delight by those who love both.

Darwin returned to England in 1836, and never set foot abroad again. He married his cousin Emma, started a family (touched by the characteristic Victorian tragedy of the death of a favorite child), settled in a big, comfortable house in Kent, and devoted himself with single-minded energy to the work of making sense of the great fabric of life. As early as 1837, his journals show, he was beginning to formulate a theory of evo- lution by natural selection. But time and again he would work on his theoretical material and then put it aside. He was often ill with mysterious maladies, which in retrospect surely look stress-related; he knew very well that his evolving theory of evolution posed a direct challenge to the Biblical doctrine of divine creation, and he agonized at the pain this would cause many people whose affection and good opinion he cherished— beginning with his beloved wife, whose religious views were far more conventional than his own. In the meantime he worked on his Beagle specimens, published an exhaustive sci­entific study of barnacles, and cultivated an acquaintance among dog breeders, horse trainers, and pigeon fanciers (raff- ish folk not ordinarily sought out by solid upper-middle-class people like the Darwins), looking for clues to natural selection in the artificial selection practiced by breeders of domestic ani­mais.