Charles Darwin

(1809 - 1882)

In 1831, at the age of twenty-two, Charles Darwin set sail on the HMS Beagle on a voyage that lasted five years, during which time he found in the Brazilian rain forest “a chaos of delight,” watched the eruption of Mount Osorno, and encountered iguanas and tortoises on the “frying hot” Galapagos Islands. “God knows what the public will think,” he worried to Alfred Russel Wallace in 1859, shortly before publishing On the Origin of Species, which outlined his theory of evolution by natural selection. After its release, T.H. Huxley warned Darwin not to be “disgusted or annoyed by the considerable abuse and misrepresentation, which, unless I greatly mistake, is in store for you.”