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About the Author:
Charles Darwin is the author of one of the most controversial and influential works in Western thought, The Origin of the Species (1859). At age twenty-two, Darwin, who had dropped out of medical school in Edinburgh, became the gentleman companion (and only secondarily, naturalist) to the moody, irascible Captain Robert FitzRoy. Although his father had wanted him to become a pastor, Darwin’s journey on the H.M.S. Beagle led to him instead becoming the forerunner of evolutionary theory.
David Case is the founder and current president of Live Free Ministries, a ministry dedicated to restoring kingdom power and authority to spiritual leadership. Since the early 1990s, David Case has held retreats for both pastors and lay persons, helping them break through bondages and pointing them toward fulfilling the call of God on their lives. Having pastored the same church for eighteen years, Pastor Case gives other pastors the tools they need to implement the lifegiver model into a whole-church setting. Case also co-hosts a radio program and ministers internationally. It is David Case's heart to blend "the supernatural of the spiritual realm" with a very solid application into the natural realm.
Richard Darwin Keynes is Emeritus Professor of Physiology at the University of Cambridge, and fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. In parallel with research and teaching on physiology and biophysics, he has a long-standing interest in the voyage of the Beagle, and has also edited The Beagle Record (1979) and Charles Darwin's Zoology Notes and Specimen Lists from the H. M. S. Beagle (2000).
In 1825 at age sixteen, Darwin matriculated at Edinburgh University to study medicine. There, his early interest in natural history developed, and he studied particularly crustaceans, sea creatures, and beetles. Nauseated by the sight of blood, however, he decided that medicine was not his vocation, left Edinburgh in 1827 and entered Christ's College, Cambridge University, with no clear sense of possible vocation, theology itself being an option. At Cambridge he became friends with J. S. Henslow, a clergyman who was also professor of botany. Although Darwin was to graduate from Cambridge with a B.A. in theology, he spent much time with Henslow, developing his interest in natural science. It was Henslow who secured a position for Darwin on an exploratory expedition aboard the HMS Beagle.
In December 1831, the year he graduated from Cambridge, Darwin embarked upon a five-year voyage to Africa and South America, acting as a companion to the captain, Robert Fitzroy. Darwin spent more time in land expeditions than at sea, where he was always seasick, but during the long voyages he continued his collecting and, cramped in his tiny cabin, meticulously wrote up his ideas. Several years after his return, at the time of the birth of his first son, William, Darwin fell ill. It is conjectured that while in South America he had contracted Chagas's disease, but whatever the cause, the effects were debilitating for the rest of Darwin's life.
By the time he returned to London in 1835, many of his letters, some to scientists like Charles Lyell and Adam Sedgwick, had been read before scientific societies, and he was already a well known and respected naturalist. His first published book, an account of his voyage aboard the Beagle, entitled Journal of Researches, appeared in 1839 and was widely popular. He married the same year; soon after, the family moved from London to a secluded house at Down, in Kent, where Darwin wrote initial sketches of his theory and then preparing himself for the full exposition, spent eight years writing a detailed set of definitive monographs on barnacles.
In 1858, when Darwin was halfway through writing his book, "Natural Selection," A. R. Wallace sent him a paper called, "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type." In language similar to Darwin's own, Wallace laid out the argument for natural selection. Wallace asked Darwin to help get the paper published -- obviously an alarming development for a man who had given twenty years of his life to getting the argument for natural selection right. Darwin's scientific friends advised him to gather materials giving evidence of his priority but to have the Wallace paper read before the Linnaean Society, along with a brief account of his own ideas. Immediately after the reading, Darwin began work on his "abstract" of "Natural Selection." The result was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, published in 1859. Despite the controversy it generated, it was an immense success and went through five more editions in Darwin's lifetime.
Darwin devoted the rest of his life to researching and writing scientific treatises, drawing on his notebooks and corresponding with scientists all over the world, and thus developing and modifying parts of his larger argument.
Darwin never traveled again and much of his scientific work was done in his own garden and study at home. Others, particularly his "bulldog," T. H. Huxley, fought the battle for evolution publicly, and as Darwin remained quietly ailing at home, his family grew -- he had ten children -- and so did his reputation. Although he was always ill with symptoms that made it impossible for him to work full days, he produced an enormous volume of work. His death, on April 19, 1882, was a national event. Despite the piety of his wife, Emma, Darwin had fallen away from religion as he reflected both on the way nature worked and on the way his favorite daughter, Annie, died painfully from an unknown feverish illness, when she was ten. Nevertheless, ironically, he was buried in Westminster Abbey.
Author biography from the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of The Origin of Species.
He broke his longtime snuff habit by keeping his snuff box in the basement and the key to it in the attic.
This was a return trip to South America for the Beagle and Darwin left the placid landscape of England to journey to a land of dynamic terrain: high mountains, earthquakes, volcanoes, strange coastlines and even stranger animals and fossils:
"Everything in this southern continent has been effected on a grand scale: the land, from the Rio Plata to Tierra del Fuego, a distance of 1,200 miles, has been raised in mass...What a history of geological changes does the simply-constructed coast of Patagonia reveal!...At Port St. Julian , in some red mud capping the gravel on the 90-feet plain, I found half the skeleton of the Macrauchenia Patachonica, a remarkable quadruped, full as large as a camel. It belongs to the same division of the Pachydermata with the rhinoceros, tapir, and palaeotherium; but in the structure of the bones of its long neck it shows a clear relation to the camel, or rather to the guanaco and llama. From recent sea-shells being found on two of the higher step-formed plains, which must have been modelled and upraised before the mud was deposited in which the Macrauchenia was entombed, it is certain that this curious quadruped lived long after the sea was inhabited by its present shells."
Darwin spent thousands of hours making observations, collecting specimens, and recording data. He went ashore all along the South American coasts, often riding horseback into the interior in order to collect more data, and he also includes his observations about the people whom he met there, from army generals to local Indians. And of course, he visited the now famous Galapagos Archipelago, the 10 islands formed by volcanic action where Darwin noticed that several species of finches existed, with beak shapes that were vastly different. He thought deeply about the comment made by the vice-governor that there were many different varieties of tortoises to be found on the island, and came to the conclusions about evolution he later elaborated upon in his Origin of Species:
"It was most striking to be surrounded by new birds, new reptiles, new shells, new insects, new plants, and yet by innumerable trifling details of structure, and even by the tones of voice and plumage of the birds, to have the temperate plains of Patagonia, or rather the hot dry deserts of Northern Chile, vividly brought before my eyes. Why, on these small points of land, which within a late geological period must have been covered by the ocean, which are formed by basaltic lava, and therefore differ in geological character from the American continent, and which are placed under a peculiar climate, - why were their aboriginal inhabitants, associated, I may add, in different proportions both in kind and number from those on the continent, and therefore acting on each other in a different manner - why were they created on American types of organization?"
The Beagle went back to England via Australia and New Zealand, and Darwin continued to collect specimens there as well. He left England as student with a keen and open mind; he returned an experienced scientist with definite ideas about the workings of nature, and raw data to substantiate his theories. He would go on of course to refine them and publish On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, that famous and still controversial book. The direction of Darwin's thought is clearly evident in The Voyage of the HMS Beagle, as well as his exuberance. This is the second edition of the book, originally published in 1845. Fascinating reading from a truly original mind!
| Introduction | xv | |
| Preface | ||
| Chapter 1 | St. Jago--Cape de Verd Islands | 1 |
| Chapter 2 | Rio de Janeiro | 16 |
| Chapter 3 | Maldonado | 34 |
| Chapter 4 | Rio Negro to Bahia Blanca | 55 |
| Chapter 5 | Bahia Blanca | 71 |
| Chapter 6 | Bahia Blanca to Buenos Ayres | 93 |
| Chapter 7 | Buenos Ayres and St. Fe | 108 |
| Chapter 8 | Banda Oriental and Patagonia | 125 |
| Chapter 9 | Santa Cruz, Patagonia, and the Falkland Islands | 156 |
| Chapter 10 | Tierra Del Fuego | 180 |
| Chapter 11 | Strait of Magellan--Climate of the Southern Coasts | 204 |
| Chapter 12 | Central Chile | 224 |
| Chapter 13 | Chiloe and Chonos Islands | 242 |
| Chapter 14 | Chiloe and Concepcion: Great Earthquake | 259 |
| Chapter 15 | Passage of the Cordillera | 279 |
| Chapter 16 | Northern Chile and Peru | 300 |
| Chapter 17 | Galapagos Archipelago | 331 |
| Chapter 18 | Tahiti and New Zealand | 358 |
| Chapter 19 | Australia | 383 |
| Chapter 20 | Keeling Island:--Coral Formations | 402 |
| Chapter 21 | Mauritius to England | 429 |
I'm a travel writing reader, I work in medicine, and I love a well-written essay. Mr. Darwin has managed to achieve 5 stars in each category in my book. His inquisitive mind and keen observations of flora and fauna make fascinating science reading. His recounting of travels inland, notes on how the people lived, what they ate, what the land was like, provide insights to a time long lost of places I'll probably never see. And his ability to bend the written word to express wonder and amazement at what he experiences at times rivals the best nature writing I've ever come across. This is one of those few books I felt sad to finish, but glad I found at all and elated to have in my library. 5-stars all the way around.
4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
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Posted December 11, 2011
Bad Scan
Like so many of the free books available for the Nook, this scan is very poor. Pagination and printing is off. It may be a good book, but the edition fails as an ebook.
It is not worth the trouble, and I am deleting it.
I guess you really do get what you pay for¿
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted July 28, 2011
Some other versions were corrupted. This one is good.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted June 30, 2006
Why read half of something, or let other people decide what aspects of Darwin's text are appropriate? For that matter, do you care what a group of anonymous B&N compilers of data think? They lead this narrative with their own biases. If you are interested in Darwin, or not, still, you should go with a more authoritative, complete edition. Stear clear.
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Overview
The Voyage of the Beagle is Darwin's fascinating account of his trip - of his biological and geological observations and collection activities, of his speculations about the causes and theories behind scientific phenomena, of his ...