Charles Darwin

• Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was an English scientist.
• He was a famous naturalist (an expert in studying nature).
• He was a famous biologist (an expert in living things).
• He was a famous geologist (an expert in rocks and fossils).
• He discovered that humans and apes have shared ancestors.

Painting of the seven-year-old Charles Darwin in 1816, by Ellen Sharples

Eight-year-old Charles already had a taste for natural history and collecting when he joined the day school run by its preacher in 1817. That July, his mother died. From September 1818, he joined his older brother Erasmus attending the nearby Anglican Shrewsbury School as a boarder.

Darwin spent the summer of 1825 as an apprentice doctor, helping his father treat the poor of Shropshire, before going to the University of Edinburgh Medical School (at the time the best medical school in the UK) with his brother Erasmus in October 1825.

He learned taxidermy in around 40 daily hour-long sessions from John Edmonstone, a freed black slave who had accompanied Charles Waterton in the South American rainforest.

Darwin's neglect of medical studies annoyed his father, who sent him to Christ's College, Cambridge, to study for a Bachelor of Arts degree as the first step towards becoming an Anglican country parson.

Darwin had to stay at Cambridge until June 1831. Darwin planned to visit Tenerife with some classmates after graduation to study natural history in the tropics. In preparation, he joined Adam Sedgwick's geology course, then on 4 August travelled with him to spend a fortnight mapping strata in Wales

I ^