It was the early summer of 1831 when English naturalist Charles Darwin set sail on HMS Beagle for four years to explore the Galapagos Islands and Tahiti. It is known that during this voyage Darwin began trying to understand how species got to where they lived and how they evolved to their current condition. However, the initial interest in this trip was, by his own admission, to see an active volcano. So how could this exciting exploration lead a young 22-year-old to spend the next thirty years of his life trying to convince the world that there was more to their existence than their idea of ​​“Creation?” Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809. He was the son of a medical officer in Shrewsbury, England. When Darwin was 13, he and his brother Erasmus opened a chemistry laboratory in the garden of his childhood home. It was during this period that Charles developed a passion for scientific experimentation. Soon after, Erasmus left home and went to study medicine at Cambridge University. It was a well-known fact among Darwin's sons that they had been educated in medicine, just as their grandfather and father had been. Things didn't seem to be going very well for young Charles Darwin when he set off for medical school in 1825. Not only did the sight of blood scare him, but he also found that studying medicine wasn't as exciting for him as his ancestors had been before .Olszowy 2In what could arguably be considered the spark that sparked Charles, he met a young freed slave from Guyana, South America, John Edmonstone, who taught him the art of taxidermy. The two talked for hours about how to conserve animals, and John told stories of the beautiful tropical rainforests where ... middle of paper ... the way the world saw natural history. Up to this point in our history, most people were under the impression that the world was created by a divine spark. That God himself touched the Earth and created all things, from birds and trees to oceans and mountains. What Charles Darwin was beginning to understand was that there was much more than this. He believed from the beginning that land forms emerged from the oceans and that all living things inhabiting them very slowly adapted to these changes and evolved. Another discovery that intrigued Darwin was that of fossilized monkeys in Africa. To Charles this essentially proved that humanity was some sort of descendant of an ape ancestor. However, he kept this thought to himself for the time being because such accusations would have been considered heresy at the time.