Charles Robert Darwin was the epitome of the nineteenth-century natural philosopher by temperament and by training. Nevertheless, the ambit of his researches, which had roots that were firmly planted in the interwoven fields of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology, is quite extraordinary in the way that it came to encompass the physical and biological world that he inhabited (A. Geikie 1909; Judd 1909; Browne 1995; Herbert 2005).

Origins and Influences

Darwin was born into a comfortable and well-respected family in the county town of Shrewsbury. His father, Robert, a noted physician, astute businessman, and financier (Browne 1995), was not scholarly in an academic sense; however, Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus was a renowned intellect. Among Erasmus’s published works were geological as well as what we might now refer to as evolutionary interpretations. The Botanic Garden (E. Darwin 1791) reveals, especially in its “Philosophical Notes XV–XXIV” and “Geological Recapitulation,” that Erasmus was well versed in contemporary debates about minerals, rocks, and earth processes. He used this to make reasoned proposals about the formation of granites, lavas, coal, limestone, clays, and ironstone and envisaged a dynamic structure to the earth that was driven by a hot fluid interior (Herbert 1991). This “dynamic” perspective also resonated with his understanding of animal life: he understood (as did his approximate contemporary in Paris, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck) that change pervades the living world. For example, Erasmus used the term “evolution” but used it as a descriptor of growth (ontogeny): the changes in structure and appearance that occur during the lifetime of any individual as it develops on a trajectory from fertilized egg to adult. However, it is also clear that Erasmus perceived the possibility of plasticity of animal form and appearance over much longer periods of time. He used the example of the existence of purposeless or rudimentary features, such as the accessory toes seen in the feet of cattle and pigs, as suggestive that such animals formerly possessed fully functional toes but that they had become vestigial with the passage of time; and he proposed more forthright views on “transmutation” in his book Zoonomia (E. Darwin 1796).