In choosing letters for publication the author has been largely guided by the wish to illustrate his father's personal character. But his life was so essentially one of work, that a history of the man could not be written without following closely the career of the author. Thus it comes about that the chief part of the book falls into chapters whose titles correspond to the names of his books.
Charles Darwin, the discoverer of natural selection, was born at Shrewsbury. His grandfather was Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), physician, radical, free-thinker), his father Dr. Robert Waring Darwin, F.R.S. (1766-1848), and his mother was the daughter of Josiah Wedgewood (1730-1795). After five years at Shrewsbury grammar school, Darwin studied medicine at Edinburgh University (1825-27) and then, with a view to the Church, entered Christ's College, Cambridge (1828). Even before he went to Cambridge, the young Darwin took numerous natural history excursions and delivered his first scientific paper.
At Kent he devoted his attention to the great work of his life -- the problem of the origin of species. After five years' work he allowed himself to speculate on the subject and drew up some short notes in 1842 which were enlarged into a series of conclusions in 1844. These conclusions were to become the principle of natural selection and the germ of Darwinian theory. Darwin delayed the publication of his findings.
Darwin will be remembered as the leader of evolutionary biology. Although he was not the originator of the theory of evolution, nor even the first to apply the notion of descent to plants and animals, Darwin was clearly the first thinker to gain widespread acceptance among nineteenth century biologists.
Darwin died suddenly, 19 April 1882, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
"A man who dares to waste an hour of life has not discovered the value of life." -- Darwin
