Charles Robert Darwin
(1809-1882)

Born in Shrewsbury in 1809, Darwin’s paternal grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, author of the poem The Botanic Garden. His mother’s father was Josiah Wedgwood. He attended Edinburgh University to study medicine, which he disliked intensely. His father then sent him to Christ’s College, Cambridge to study theology – which he also disliked. In 1831 he embarked as a naturalist on HMS Beagle’s five-year journey to Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, Chile, Peru and some Pacific islands. On his return he discovered that some of his scientific papers had been privately published and that he was regarded as a leading scientific thinker. In 1838 he was appointed as Secretary to the Geological Society. The following year he married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood. He spent the rest of his life developing his theory of evolution for publication, an abstract of which was published in 1859 as On the origin of species… He died in 1882. His lifelong friend Joseph Dalton Hooker had appealed in his 1880 annual report for help in updating Steudel’s listing of plant names Nomenclator Botanicus. Darwin responded with an offer of financial assistance. Work started in February 1882 and when Darwin died a few months later his family took on the expense of publication. Hooker called the new work Index Kewensis, initially a record of the botanical names of seed-bearing plants published between 1735 and 1885.

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