Charles Darwin
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Charles Darwin (1809–1882) was an English naturalist, born in Shrewsbury into a prosperous family; his grandfathers were the physician and poet Erasmus Darwin and the potter Josiah Wedgwood. He abandoned medical studies at Edinburgh, and was studying at Cambridge with a view to becoming a clergyman when he was invited to sail as a naturalist aboard HMS Beagle. Its voyage round the world from 1831 to 1836, including its visit to the Galápagos Islands, gave him the observations on which he would build for the rest of his life. Settled with his wife Emma at Down House in Kent, he worked for two decades on his theory of evolution by natural selection, and published On the Origin of Species in 1859, after Alfred Russel Wallace reached similar ideas. His later books include The Descent of Man (1871). He is buried in Westminster Abbey.
