Chapters 13 and 14 Summary and Analysis

In Chapter 13, Charles Darwin based his hypothesis that the world was old and always changing on the works of Lyell. During his five-year world-wide expedition on his brig, the Beagle, Darwin saw the richness of the world that few had ever seen. In Chile, he found marine fossils on mountaintops. In 1834, heading from the Galapagos Islands, he theorized that the Dangerous Archipelago was once a series of volcanoes.

As a young man, Darwin had been a creationist. Evolution was not a new concept to him. In fact, his grandfather Erasmus Darwin had written the book, "Zoonomia," an evolutionary work about the possibility that all life came from a single ancestor. Darwin's book, "The Origin of the Species," had three main premises: 1) that there were variations within species; 2) that living creatures create more off-spring than nature can support; and, 3) that...