Charles Darwin was a British scientist who laid the foundations of modern evolutionary theory with his concept of the development of all life forms through the slow process of natural selection. His work had a great influence on the life and earth sciences and on modern thought in general. Darwin was born in 1809 in Shrewsbury, a small market town in Shropshire, England. Her wealthy doctor father was the son of Erasmus Darwin who had written The Laws of Organic Life. His mother was the daughter of the craftsman Josiah Wedgwood of dinnerware fame. Although she died when he was eight, Darwin lived a happy and secure childhood, loved and encouraged by four adoring sisters, an older brother named Erasmus, a team of loyal servants, and numerous relatives of Darwin and Wedgwood. From a young age Charles collected specimens from nature and conducted chemical experiments. When he reached the age of 16, his father sent him to Edinburgh University to study medicine, a concept for which he had no enthusiasm. As a result his father sent him to Cambridge University to study divinity. There Darwin met the botanist John Stevens Henslow, whose passion for science infected Darwin. This pushed him to work more intensely on the study of the samples. Abandoning the idea of ​​study for a career in the Church, he left Cambridge at the age of 22 and immediately joined a scientific group that was touring North Wales to learn how to conduct geological field work. Shortly after the tour concluded, Darwin received a life-changing offer. In 1831, the British Admiralty invited him to embark as an unpaid naturalist aboard HMS Beagle, bound for South America and the Pacific Islands on a scientific expedition. Darwin's work... an idea at the heart of the paper... placed Europeans at the head of a hierarchy of racial types. Like most of his contemporaries, Darwin believed that Europeans were conquering the world not only because they had superior technology, but also because they were more intelligent than other races. He commented at length on the various factors that seemed to lead the inferior races to decline towards extinction in the face of white settlers. Despite his healthful habits, Darwin was ill for much of his adult life, plagued by insomnia and stomach ailments. His supporters tended to glorify his plight as the price to pay for such stressful intellectual activity, while the Church blamed his problems on a guilty conscience and denounced him from pulpits across England for his beliefs. Darwin died at his home in Kent in 1882 and was buried respectfully alongside English heroes in Westminster Abbey.