Charles Robert Darwin, who was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England, on February 12, 1809, was a great British scientist. Charles Darwin developed his idea of evolution called natural selection. "His work was of major influence on life, earth sciences, and modern thought in general (Encarta)."
             Darwin was the fifth child of a wealthy and sophisticated English family. His maternal grandfather was a great china and pottery creator named Josiah Wedgwood and his paternal grandfather was a famous 18th-century physician named Erasmus Darwin (Encarta). After he graduated from school in 1825, Darwin went to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine. In 1827 he dropped out of medical school and entered the University of Cambridge because he wanted to become a clergyman of the Episcopal Church. There, Darwin met two people named Adam Sedgwick, who was a geologist, and John Stevens Henslow, who was a naturalist. Henslow showed Darwin how to be a thorough witness of natural events and an assembler of specimens. At the age for twenty-two, after graduation from Cambridge, which was in 1831, Darwin boarded the HMS Beagle, an English surveying ship.
             In his geological observations aboard the beagle, Darwin was most impressed with the effect that natural forces had on shaping the earth's surface (Funk and Wagnals 42). Darwin noted that certain fossils of supposedly extinct species closely resembled living species in the same geographical area. In the Galápagos Islands, off the coast of Ecuador, he observed that each island supported its own form of tortoise, mockingbird, and finch; the various forms were closely related but differed in structure and eating habits from island to island (Funk 43). His observations led Darwin to think of possible links between separate but similar species.
             Because of his observations, Darwin began working on this idea of changeability in his Notebooks on the Transmutation of Species. By...