Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) was a British naturalist whose early scientific career grew out of the voyage of HMS Beagle, which lasted from 1831 to 1836. During the years after his return, he worked through geological observations and correspondence with people who had studied reefs in different parts of the world. The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, published in 1842, was the first of his major geological monographs and set out an explanation for how atolls and other reef formations developed.

The coral book appeared before Darwin’s later work on evolution made his name familiar to a much wider public. He followed it with volumes on volcanic islands and the geology of South America, then published On the Origin of Species in 1859. The sequence shows a naturalist moving from a focused problem in geology toward broader questions about the history of life. Darwin’s coral theory was debated for many years and later received support from deep drilling in the Pacific. The book represented here belongs to that first period of synthesis: travel observations, reports from other observers and a geological argument assembled into one sustained account.