Charles Darwin

Darwin’s brother introduced Babbage. Edmonstone, a freed slave, taught him taxidermy and talked of the tropics. Grant and Henslow were influential tutors. He worked with Sedgwick before joining FitzRoy on the Beagle, and visited Herschel in Cape Town; Owen and Gould helped establish the status of material he brought back from that voyage. Lyell, Haeckel and Gray championed Darwin’s ideas, and his close friend Huxley publicly defended him; Agassiz opposed Darwinism, but sent a crate of barnacles from America to aid his research. Though Humboldt respected him greatly, Darwin could hardly get a word in edgeways.