Darwin - The Not So Stupid "Village Idiot"

A boy who was so deep in thought that he walked off the edge of a bank seven feet high, must be either the village idiot or a coming genius. As it chanced Charles Darwin was the latter, when he did that foolish thing, but his family was not sure he was not the former. His father told him, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching; you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family." His father did not really believe this, but there is no doubt that young Darwin was half the time in a brown study, the other half up to boyish pursuits like birdnesting, and pheasant-shooting (he was afterwards ashamed of his love of hunting), and from the first he had the collecting mania, which drives parents to despair.

In some boys the rage for collecting takes the form of amassing hordes of postage stamps; with others it is specimens of rocks, seeds, eggs and other natural history objects. The latter sort Darwin had, and very useless it seemed to his tutors and elders. He liked to tinker with chemicals, too, and for that reason was nicknamed "Gas" by other boys. One of his teachers publicly rebuked him in class for wasting his time on science. With the idea that Darwin might become a doctor he was sent to Edinburgh, where he attended all Science lectures and found them so dull, so full of medieval superstition, that he either went to sleep or walked out in disgust.

Darwin says that at the most he ever had more than a dozen patients, and finally throwing off the pretense of pursuing a medical career he went to Cambridge University to study natural history. There it was that he formed his first friendships among other scientists, and from the first he was fascinated by what geology offered as a field for imaginative science, for Darwin's mind was as imaginative as a poet's. How far he differed from other scientists of his day who were apt to be dry and literal, is shown by the fact that he called the attention of Sedgwick, then England's chief geologist, to a tropical shell found in a pit near Darwin's home in Shrewsbury. Sedgwick said (probably rightly) that someone must have thrown it there, but he added, to Darwin's amazement, that it would be a terrible misfortune to geology if it should be found that it actually belonged among the rocks of the pit, as it would upset all notions of geology of that day.

Later, Darwin actually did find arctic fossil shells in that same pit, but by that time Darwin himself had upset all notions of all the natural sciences. Darwin, without ever in his life engaging in any heated controversies, fought for scientific liberty of conscience, as others have fought for religious liberty.