ABSTRACT
Darwin was born into a middle-class and privileged family who were interested in the natural world. His father Robert was a country doctor. His grandfather Erasmus was a surgeon, naturalist and poet who had published his own ideas about the nature of evolution in a book called Zoonomia. As a child Darwin was fascinated by nature and he collected animals and plants. He was unhappy at school where he was considered idle and ordinary. There was no indication of his creative mind and the contribution he was going to make to science in the future.
