Charles Darwin as a Student in Edinburgh, 1825–27

Abstract

CHARLES DARWIN in his autobiography, written in 1876, gives in half a dozen pages (“Life and Letters”, I, pp. 36-42) an account of his two academic sessions as a medical student in Edinburgh. This account includes brief references to his naturalist friends and acquaintances, a statement that he collected specimens in the tidal pools on the shore of the Firth of Forth and by going out with the “trawlers”, and that he made new observations on the “so-called ova of Flustra”, which “were in fact larvae”, and on the egg-cases of Pontobdella muricata.