A kid who was so deep in thought that he walked off the edge of a seven foot high bench must be either the village idiot or a future genius. He happened to be the last Charles Darwin when he did that foolish thing, but his family wasn’t sure he wasn’t the first. His father told him: “You don’t care about anything but hunting dogs and hunting rats; you will be a disgrace to you and your whole family.” His father didn’t really believe this, but there is no doubt that young Darwin spent half his time in a brown study, the other half engaged in childhood activities like bird nesting and pheasant hunting (he was later ashamed of his love of hunting). , and from the beginning he had a mania for collecting, which makes parents desperate.
For some boys, the urge to collect takes the form of amassing hordes of postage stamps; with others it deals with rock specimens, seeds, eggs and other objects of natural history. This last type was held by Darwin, and it seemed very useless to his tutors and elders. He also liked to play with chemicals, and for that reason other children nicknamed him “Gas”. One of his teachers publicly reprimanded him in class for wasting time on science. With the idea that Darwin might become a doctor, they sent him to Edinburgh, where he attended all the science lectures and found them so boring, so full of medieval superstition, that he either went to sleep or left in disgust.
Darwin says that, at most, he had more than a dozen patients, and finally, giving up any pretense of pursuing a medical career, he went to Cambridge University to study natural history. It was there that he formed his first friendships among other scientists, and from the beginning he was fascinated by what geology offered as a field for imaginative science, for Darwin’s mind was as imaginative as a poet’s. How far he differed from other scientists of his day who tended to be dry and literal is shown by the fact that he brought to the attention of Sedgwick, then England’s chief geologist, a tropical shell found in a well near the house of Darwin at Shrewsbury. . Sedgwick said (probably rightly) that someone must have dumped it there, but he added, to Darwin’s astonishment, that it would be a terrible disgrace to geology if it were found to actually belong to the rocks in the pit, as he would. he upset all notions of geology of that day.
Later, Darwin actually found arctic fossil shells in that very pit, but by this time Darwin himself had upset every notion in every natural science. Darwin, never involving himself in heated controversies in his life, fought for scientific freedom of conscience, as others have fought for religious freedom.