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The discovery of a vocation: Darwin's early geology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Extract
When HMS Beagle made its first landfall in January 1832, the twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin set about taking detailed notes on geology. He was soon planning a volume on the geological structure of the places visited, and letters to his sisters confirm that he identified himself as a ‘geologist’. For a young gentleman of his class and income, this was a remarkable thing to do. Darwin's conversion to evolution by selection has been examined so intensively that it is easy to forget that the most extraordinary decision he ever made was to devote his life to the study of the natural world by becoming a geologist. It is only slightly less astonishing that he should have decided to align his work with Charles Lyell's controversial programme of geological reform, which had almost no followers in England.
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References
1 General surveys of Darwin's geological work include: Judd, J. W., ‘Darwin and geology’, in Darwin and Modern Science (ed. Seward, A. C.), Cambridge, 1909, pp. 337–84Google Scholar; the introductory essays by Judd in Darwin, C., On the Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs: Also Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands and Parts of South America Visited during the Voyage of H. M. S. Beagle (ed. Judd, J. W.), London, n. d.Google Scholar; Herbert, S., ‘The logic of Darwin's discovery’, Ph.D. dissertation, Brandeis University, 1968Google Scholar; idem., ‘Darwin as a geologist’, Scientific American, (1986), 254, no. 5, pp. 116–23Google Scholar; Rhodes, F. H. T., pp. 193–229Google Scholar, this volume.
2 Of course, there were many more skilled and experienced geologists in 1832, but few who were so young.
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36 The notes (DAR 5, fols. 5–16) are transcribed in Barrett, P. H., ‘The Sedgwick-Darwin geological tour of North Wales’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, (1974), 118, pp. 146–64Google Scholar. Sedgwick's maps and notebooks, including a typed transcription by O. T. Jones, are in the Sedgwick Museum, University of Cambridge.
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57 DAR 32.1, vol. 23v. See also Notebook 1.4, entry for 25 January 1832: ‘Reason for not think the sea has fallen.’
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72 Ibid., p. 23.
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