Charles Darwin was  born  in  1809, in the town of  Shrewsbury  (England), the fifth child of Robert and Susannah Darwin. At the age of nine, he entered Shrewsbury School for formal schooling. He  was a voracious  reader  with  a  taste for natural history,  travel  and  poetry. At the age of sixteen, he was enrolled as a medical student at Edinburgh University, which he left after two years. He joined Christ's College, Cambridge in 1828 as a student of theology. Though he obtained a pass degree in theology, he spent much of his time at  Cambridge  in  pursuing his  interests  in  natural  history.

In 1831, at the age of twenty two, Charles Darwin embarked on a momentous globe-girdling voyage. He joined the crew  of  the  Royal  Navy's  survey ship, Beagle  as a naturalist. For the next five years, the Beagle circumnavigated the earth, sailing across the Atlantic to  the  east  coast  of  South America, through  the straits of Tierra del Fuego North along the west coast to  Galapagos Islands, then across the Pacific to Sydney and home to England via Cape of  Good Hope and Bahia (Brazil). Everything he encountered - seabirds and beetles on bare mid-Atlantic rock, teeming  fauna and flora in South  American Jungles, fossils in the high Andes; all were minutely recorded in his diaries.  Darwin was deeply impressed by everything he saw and experienced. All these, combined with the puzzling differences between animals and birds of the  same  species living  on the various Galapagos Islands, led him to conclude  that  all species of plant and animal life have slowly evolved over thousands of years, adapting themselves to their environment by a process of natural selection, leaving only the selected species to survive. These  findings and events, during the voyage of the Beagle resulted in the publication of his two great  books, The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). These books continue to influence human thought ever since.

In 1842, Darwin left London and took up residence at Down House in the village of Downe in Kent, where he spent the rest of his life studying and writing. He died on 19th April 1882 at his home in Downe and was buried close to Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey.

Indian Posts & Telegraphs Department is privileged to issue a stamp to honour the memory of a great naturalist.

Source : Information Folder issued by Indian Posts & Telegraph Department, Government of India