Background
Charles Darwin grew up with an interest in natural history, and as a student at the University of Cambridge he became a pupil and close friend of botany professor John Stevens Henslow. The year he graduated, Darwin was given a supernumerary position as a gentleman naturalist and geologist on the second voyage of HMS Beagle, a trip that lasted five years. By the time he returned in October 1836, he had doubts about the doctrine that species were fixed and unchanging. Within months, experts informed him that specimens he had collected were separate species, not just varieties, and the patterns he saw inspired the inception of his theory of natural selection in 1838. Darwin began editing and publishing the expert reports, collected in the Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, at the same time as writing a series of books on geology, the first of which was The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. His "species work" was his "prime hobby", a background to this writing, but it evolved into an extensive research programme during the twenty years before he published his theory.
Read more about this topic: Fertilisation Of Orchids
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)