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9780140432688

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'Classic' is almost too trite a word for this wonderful story in Darwin's own words of his famous career-setting journey of a lifetime. Darwin was 22 years old in 1831 when he accmpanied Captain Robert FitzRoy on a mapping-collecting trip to South America. Darwin returned five years later, having marvelled at the wonders of the natural world and taken copious notes about it which led to books and papers and scientific celebrity. It would be several more decades (1859) before Darwin published the famous theory of natural selection to explain evolution but the seeds were all here in this trip - the finches of the Galapagos, the arguments with Captain FitzRoy, the first glimpse of the astonishing diversity of the tropical rain forest, the geological wonders that spoke to Darwin about the Earth's changes. It is highly readable, a book to give any modern adventurer a hint of the thrill of discovery, a book to dip into and to come back to time and again. (Kirkus UK)

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Charles Darwin, a Victorian scientist and naturalist, has become one of the most famous figures of science to date. Born in 1809 to an upper-middle-class medical family, he was destined for a career in either medicine or the Anglican Church. However, he never completed his medical education and his future changed entirely in 1831 when he joined HMS Beagle as a self-financing, independent naturalist. On returning to England in 1836 he began to write up his theories and observations which culminated in a series of books, most famously On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, where he challenged and contradicted contemporary biological and religious beliefs with two decades worth of scientific investigation and theory. Darwin's theory of natural selection is now the most widely accepted scientific model of how species evolve. He died in 1882 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

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