9781422277607

View of the grammar school in Shrewsbury, England, where Charles Darwin’s education began in 1818.

Darwin from time to time on his medical rounds. In his spare time he became a collector—of insects, shells, coins, or anything else that caught his fancy—a hobby that none of his brothers or sisters shared. At the age of nine he was sent to nearby Shrewsbury School, where he lived as a boarder. But as school was only about a mile from his home, he often walked over to visit his family in the evening before lock-up. He was no scholar: at school he learned Latin and Greek (which bored him) and very little else. This limited curriculum was not unusual for the times, but it did little to stimulate Charles’s interests or natural abilities. However, he was a voracious reader with a taste for natural history, travel and poetry. During his schooldays he kept up his interest in collecting, and

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