Charles Darwin* Read Online Free PDF Page A

passage and found that passenger ships to the Canaries departed only in June.
    Meanwhile, Henslow introduced Darwin to his old tutor, the great Cambridge professor of geology Adam Sedgwick. Darwin had diligently avoided Sedgwick’s classes, still disillusioned by the boring geology classes he’d taken at Edinburgh.
    But now Henslow asked Sedgwick to take Darwin as his assistant on a geological walking trip through Wales. Darwin overcame his resistance to geology and agreed. Before the trip he even practiced using his “clinometer,” the tool for measuring mountains, on the furniture in his bedroom.
    As The Mount was on the way to Wales, Sedgwick offered to meet Darwin there. That night Darwin, all excited, told the professor a story he’d heard of a tropical shell found in a nearby gravel pit. This news contradicted the known geology of the area. Sedgwick gently pointed out Darwin’s naïveté. The shell could have landed there in a number of ways that had nothing to do with the geological makeup of the land. Just one shell was not nearly enough evidence to overturn established knowledge.
    From this, Darwin learned “that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.” It was better not to draw conclusions without lots of proof.
    Sedgwick’s goal in Wales was to correct errors in earlier geological maps of the area. These maps, which recorded different types of rock layers (strata), were used by scientists to learn the geological history of an area. Darwin quickly learned how to identify rock specimens, interpret rock strata, and generalize from his observations. Sometimes he went off on his own, and he and Sedgwick would meet up later and compare notes. When Sedgwick made use of some of Darwin’s findings, it made Darwin “exceedingly proud.”
    He returned to The Mount with a new passion for geology. He vaguely looked forward to Cambridge in the fall and continuing his studies to enter the church. Ras, whose delicate health had forced him to give up medicine and live off his inheritance, was more cynical and made fun of Charles’s lack of proper religious fervor. With two weeks to kill before school, Charles went off for some intense shooting with his Uncle Josiah.
    On his return home, there was a letter from Professor Henslow. Henslow had been asked to recommend someone—a gentleman—to work as an unpaid naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle . This ship of the Royal Navy was going to explore the coast of South America and its ports. Ensuring the safety of trade routes was a crucial step in expanding the mighty British Empire. After that the Beagle would continue on to the South Sea Islands and Australia, circling the world over the course of two years. If new gold or diamond deposits were located, so much the better.
    The ship was sailing from Plymouth in a month. Would Darwin be interested?
    Silly question.

CHAPTER FOUR
    The Journey of a Lifetime
    ATRIP AROUND the world . . . seeing birds, bugs, and flowers he (and most naturalists) had never seen before . . . on a ship with a library of 250 books, including the latest science books and the complete Encyclopedia Britannica . . . out of school, away from his nagging father, treated with respect as the ship’s naturalist. . . .
    To the twenty-two-year-old Darwin, it all sounded incredibly exciting. He had no real idea what he was letting himself in for, but it seemed like a fantastic opportunity, for what he didn’t know yet. “I immediately said I would go,” Darwin wrote later.
    But first he had to get around his father’s serious objection to the “wild scheme.” The risks were too high—harsh conditions, disease, shipwreck, death—and the whole idea meant yet another delay in Charles’s settling down to a proper profession. Darwin went to Uncle Josiah for help. Point by point, Josiah answered the objections of Charles’s father, and the doctor finally changed his mind.
    The captain of the Beagle was