As a young boy, Charles Darwin hated school and was often scolded forconducting “useless” experiments. Yet his passion for the natural world was so strong that he suffered through terrible seasickness during his five-year voyage aboard The Beagle. Darwin collected new creatures from the coasts of Africa, South America, and the Galapagos Islands, and expanded his groundbreaking ideas that would change people's understanding of the natural...

"Charles Darwin was by nature a homebody, a breeder of pigeons, a close student of barnacles--in short, a cautious and deeply shy man. Yet he found himself burdened with a profoundly radical insight. This elusive character, whose theories have had such a revolutionizing impact on our understanding of nature, remains as misapprehended as his most wondrous, frightening idea: "natural selection," the primary mechanism of evolution. In this concise and...

"Francis Willughby lived and thrived in the midst of the rapidly accelerating scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Traveling with his Cambridge tutor John Ray, they decided to overhaul the whole of natural history by imposing order on its messiness and complexity. It was exhilarating, exacting, and exhausting work. Yet before their first book, Ornithology , could be completed, Willughby died in 1672. Since then, Ray's reputation has grown,...

"Recounts the life and work of 19th century English naturalist Charles Darwin and includes related activities for the reader"--Provided by publisher.

Peter Raby lectures in Drama and English at Homerton College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of the widely praised biography Samuel Butler, Bright Paradise: Victorian Scientific Travellers (Princeton), Fair Ophelia: A Life of Harriet Smithson Berlioz, and Aubrey Beardsley and the 1890s. He also writes extensively on theater and is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde and The Cambridge Companion to Pinter (forthcoming). In...

Traces the life and work of the British biologist made famous by his controversial theory of natural selection.

A brief biography of English naturalist responsible for the advancement of the science of evolution. Two hundred years after Charles Darwin's birth (February 12, 1809), this thoroughly illustrated, yet concise biography reveals the great scientist as husband, father, and friend. Tim M. Berra tells the fascinating story of the man and the idea that changed everything. Berra discusses Darwin's revolutionary scientific work, its impact on modern-day...

A biography of the English naturalist who, after collecting plants and animals from around the world, came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection.