Charles and Emma Read Online Free

lively woman, and Dr. Darwin had been very much in love with her. But she was sickly before she died, so Charles and Catherine were raised and taught by the older girls: Marianne, Caroline, and Susan. Charles was very close to his older sisters, and looked to them as mothers. And he always adored and looked up to his big brother, Erasmus. But growing up he liked to spend much of his time alone. He took long walks by himself around the Shropshire countryside, thinking.
    One day he was walking on a public footpath at the top of some old ruins around Shrewsbury. He was so caught up in his thoughts that he walked right off the footpath and fell down seven or eight feet. He remembered years later that “the number of thoughts which passed through my mind during this very short, but sudden and wholly unexpected fall, was astonishing.”
    Charles could entertain himself for hours just by thinking, or by observing birds, or watching sticks and leaves float down a stream. He made notes as he watched the birds, writing down what they did, how they behaved. And like many young boys, he was a collector. He collected shells, seals, coins, and minerals. He studied them and organized them by kind—in the tradition of natural historians. As he got older, his great love was hunting and shooting. Later in life he shuddered at how many animals he had killed. But at the time he quivered with joy and excitement before picking up a gun.
    Soon after Susanna died, Dr. Darwin sent Charles to a boarding school that was just a mile from the Mount. Since school was so close and since he was not happy there—they didn’t teach him much, or what they did try to teach him he wasn’t interested in learning—Charles went home often and usually had to run to school before classes started or before the buildings were locked up at night. When he wasn’t sure he would get there on time, he’d pray earnestly to God to help him. Much later he remembered that if he got to school on time, he attributed his success “to the prayers and not to my quick running, and marveled how generally I was aided.” In spite of his father’s nonbelief, Charles gave God the credit.
    In high school, Charles was still not a good student. Yet outside of school, in a little shed at home, Charles loved to do chemistry experiments with Erasmus. He did them so often that his school friends nicknamed him Gas. But science was not considered a valuable use of any young man’s time, and his headmaster admonished him for not paying more attention to his math or his Latin.
    Dr. Darwin decided to take Charles out of high school since he wasn’t making much use of it anyway. Erasmus, who was twenty-one, was going to Edinburgh, Scotland, to study medicine; Charles could tag along. Both boys were bright, and it seemed obvious to Dr. Darwin that they should follow him in his profession. So at only sixteen, Charles went straight to medical school.
    In Edinburgh, some of the professors and students loved natural history, and Charles learned from them. He spent time with Erasmus, went to scientific talks, joined clubs, and got to know a freed slave named John Edmonstone, who taught him how to stuff birds. This would become quite handy later on, and he enjoyed Edmonstone’s company verymuch. But he didn’t like his medical school classes. He watched two operations, both of which he ran away from before they were finished. One of them was an amputation on a child; the child screamed in pain, for there was no anesthesia. Charles listened to the poor child’s screams and saw all that blood and decided he could never go into medicine. He hated the sight of blood for the rest of his life.
    When Dr. Darwin heard that Charles wanted to leave school, he wrote to him in anger, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”
    Erasmus did not become a doctor either.