For one undergraduate at Cambridge the book was like a summons to arms. ‘Humboldt’s Personal Narrative and Herschel’s On Natural Philosophy stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science. No one of a dozen other books influenced me nearly so much as these two.’ The undergraduate was twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin, and his humble contribution was to be On the Origin of Species (1859).27
