“There is grandeur in this view of life.”
On the Origin of Species, 1859Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England, in 1809. As a young man he sailed as naturalist aboard HMS Beagle, and for five years he collected, measured and wondered his way around the world.
What he saw on that voyage, and puzzled over for twenty years after, became On the Origin of Species. He wrote it plainly and carefully, knowing how much it would unsettle, and it changed how we understand our own place among living things.
He worked from a quiet house in Kent, tending his garden, his earthworms and his many children, patient to the very last. He died in 1882 and lies in Westminster Abbey.
A tribute, kept by Here After All.
The work they left
On the Origin of Species, 1859, carried the idea he had held quietly for twenty years: descent with modification, natural selection, the tree of life. The Descent of Man followed, and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, and at the last a small beloved book on earthworms and the making of soil.
The Voyage of the Beagle remains the best door into him: a young naturalist in the Galapagos and the pampas, measuring, collecting, and wondering his way toward the idea that reordered biology.
The estate keeps ten tributes · Fyodor Dostoevsky · Franz Kafka · Nikola Tesla · Alan Turing · Marie Curie · Arthur Schopenhauer · Emily Dickinson · Sigmund Freud · Vincent van Gogh