Darwin On The Galapagos

Darwin has admitted that he failed, as Sedgwick did, while they were on a walking tour in Wales, to notice the plain evidences of the passage over that country of the Great Glacier. "We spent many hours there," he said, "examining all the rocks with extreme care…but neither of us saw a trace of the wonderful glacial phenomena all around us; we did not notice the plainly scored rocks, the perched boulders, the lateral and terminal moraines. Yet these phenomena are so conspicuous that…a house burnt down by fire did not tell its story more plainly than this valley."

Partly then, because of the depressing mental influence of the old-style scientist by his side, partly because his mind was on pheasant-shooting, Darwin just missed a great discovery the honors of which were to be won by Louis Agassiz. Such are the turns of Fate. But Darwin's great days of discovery were at hand. By good fortune, and against his father's advice, he went on a voyage of exploration in the ship Beagle, traveling all over the world, touching on nearly every continent and important island. Though in after years illness prevented Darwin from leaving England, almost from leaving his home, the sights he saw, the facts he gathered, the inspirations that came to him on this voyage, lasted him all his life and enabled him to write his fascinating books from his bed or his desk at home, looking out on a quiet country landscape in England.

It was on the weird Galapagos Islands, off the coast of South America, that Darwin's curiosity and imagination received, quite literally, their greatest thrill. A less imaginative or inquisitive man might have noticed what he noticed, namely, that on each island the plants and animals differed a little from each other, and all differed a little from related plants and animals of South America, without asking himself why this was so. To Darwin it seemed obvious that different conditions on different islands had caused plants and animals, originally of the same sort, to vary a little, and that was the germ of his great theory of evolution.

When he returned to England he opened his notebook and commenced to write down his first thoughts on this subject, and kept silently at it for twenty years before he was ready to disclose his new ideas. The idea of evolution was not new. Aristotle, the old Greek naturalist, had it; Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, whose writings Darwin had read without any lasting mental impression, contained the germs of Darwin's ideas. The great French naturalist, Lamarck, had already announced a theory of evolution that all his life struck Darwin as ridiculous. Rafinesque, an American scientist whose greatness people are just beginning to realize, had expressed some of Darwin's ideas and been hooted at. But Darwin did have a new theory of evolution, and one more reasonable than any that had so far been offered.

By: davidbunch

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