charles_darwin

20
CHARLES DARWIN AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES
human blood made him physically sick. 7 He fled from one particularly
stomach-churning operation on a child—the regular use of
anesthetics did not occur until the 1850s—and his efforts at studying
were dilatory at best. Darwin felt no call or inclination to become a
doctor when he actually had to study medicine.
His time at Edinburgh University was not a complete waste. In
his first year, he went regularly on long Sunday walks with his
brother Erasmus. Darwin acquired the habit of picking up and collecting
marine life such as sea slugs. John Edmonstone, a freed black
slave living in Edinburgh, taught him how to stuff and mount birds.
He joined the Plinian Society, a group of students who met regularly
to discuss papers on natural history. He took a course in geology
and zoology from Robert Jameson (1774–1854), professor of natural
history at the university, in which he learned the basics of annotating
rock strata and had free access to the fourth largest natural history
museum in Europe. He also befriended Robert Grant (1793–1874), a
physician who had abandoned medicine so that he could study marine
life and who later became professor of zoology at London University.
Darwin accompanied Grant on field trips to the Firth of
Forth, and Grant encouraged Darwin to study marine invertebrates.
Darwin was studying natural history. Although he went on the
Beagle voyage around the world at the seemingly tender age of
twenty-three, by his twentieth birthday, Darwin was learning both
the skills of a naturalist and some of the controversial ideas debated
by scientists of the time.
These developments did not please Robert Darwin. The news of
Darwin’s lack of interest in medicine, obtained through Darwin’s confessions
in letters to his sisters, was bad enough, but Darwin’s trips
around the countryside to see various friends during the summer of
1827 and his obsession with shooting suggested to Robert Darwin
that his son would become a dilettante—a wealthy son squandering
his father’s money on trivial pursuits. Robert Darwin intervened in
his son’s life again: Charles Darwin would go to Cambridge University
and study to become a clergyman.
The Cambridge Years, 1827–1831
If Robert Darwin believed that his son would settle into a less
dissolute life at Cambridge, he was mistaken. Looking back on his
years at the university, Darwin claimed that ‘‘my time was wasted, as
far as the academical studies were concerned, as completely as at
Edinburgh and at school.’’ Darwin may have been too hard on