The letters in this volume span the years from 1822, when Darwin was schoolboy in Shrewsbury, to the end of 1859, when the Origin of species was published. The early letters portray Darwin as an engaging and inventive twelve-year-old in the midst of his family, and then as a lively sixteen-year-old medical student at Edinburgh University. Two years after going up to Edinburgh he abandoned any idea of following his father in becoming a physician and transferred to Cambridge University to prepare for the ministry. His interests as an undergraduate at Cambridge, as at Edinburgh, were clearly outside the established academic curriculum. He became an enthusiastic collector of insects, and a devoted follower of the professor of botany, John Stevens Henslow, who encouraged his interest in natural history, for which no degree was then offered. Soon after Darwin took his BA degree, Henslow recommended him for the post of unoffical naturalist and companion to Robert FitzRoy, captain of HMS Beagle, which was being prepared for a survey voyage to South America and the Pacific.