What did Charles Darwin do?
Charles Darwin was an English naturalist. He was born on February 12th 1809 (the same day in fact as the 16th US President, Abraham Lincoln), educated at Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities, and in the years 1831 to 1835 participated in a five year voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle. While Beagle’s mission was to survey and chart coastlines, Darwin amassed a huge collection of natural history samples and studying the geology, botany and biology of the areas that the ship visited. When Darwin returned to England, based in part on the samples he collected, he gradually developed his theory of evolution natural selection. Although the great age of the Earth and even evolutionary ideas (such as the idea that successive generations of organisms change over time and that one species can transmutate into another) were a commonplace among the scientific community, these ideas had not generally reached a wider public. This however changed in the 1840s when an anonymously published book
