Beetle mania

Charles Darwin’s interest in natural history goes back at least to his days as a college student, although not as an area of study but as an avid hobby.

While a student at Cambridge Darwin took up the Victorian mania for collecting beetles. One day he had collected two beetles, one in each hand, when he spied a third new kind, and in his words, “I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas! It ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, and was the third one.“

Despite that miscue, Darwin’s beetle-collecting hobby laid his foundation in collecting, identifying and classifying natural history specimens, and taught him something about proper field collecting techniques.

Photo credit: http://www.ent.iastate.edu/imagegal/coleoptera/dogbane/dogbane_beetle.html