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Then one day human remains were found. In the bed of the river Somme, near Abbeville in northern France, J. B. de Perthes discovered worked flint tools. From their position in the strata it was clear that they antedated the biblical chronology for man by a considerable margin.

The early years of mountaineering in Switzerland: an ascent of Mont Blanc in 1830.

The epoch-making theory that was to come out of all this geological work appeared in 1844, when Charles Darwin pencilled thirty-five pages of notes on his observations of nature since embarking on a voyage on board the research vessel HMS Beagle in 1831. Darwin was the son of a successful and wealthy doctor from Shrewsbury and his wife was the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the pottery manufacturer. He had generally been considered below average at school, and he recalled his father saying: ‘You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and to all your family.’After failing to become a doctor at Edinburgh University, Darwin went to Cambridge to study theology. He said later: ‘Considering how fiercely I have been attacked by the orthodox, it seems ludicrous that I once intended to become a clergyman!’

At Cambridge Darwin made friends with John Henslow, whose lectures on botany he attended. He spent most of his time at Cambridge not on theology but collecting beetles, and in his last year became determined to make a contribution to science. Henslow recommended him as an unpaid naturalist to the captain of the Beagle, and on 27 December 1831 Darwin set sail on a voyage that was to last for five years.

One of the books Darwin had read just before departure was the first volume of Lyell’s Principles. He was profoundly affected by it. Later, in On the Origin of Species, he was to write: ‘He who can read Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work on the Principles of Geology… yet does not admit how incomprehensively vast have been the past periods of time, may at once close this volume.’

Lyell’s theories on how species might be wiped out or caused to proliferate by local environmental change were supported by what Darwin found when he reached South America. There he came across evidence that the climate had changed and with it the life forms. The great land animals had become extinct, but the shells had survived. Species introduced by European colonists had displaced the indigenous versions.

The beetle collection made by Charles Darwin during the voyage of the Beagle. Like Wallace, Darwin found overwhelming evidence of variety of species among insects.

A page from Darwin’s notebooks, in which he begins to develop his theory. Here, he has sketched out an evolutionary tree connecting living and extinct genera.

Natural selection, illustrated by the Galapagos finches. Each variety had evolved to suit an ecological niche on the islands. The similarity of all these varieties to finches on the mainland weakened the theory of separate, independent creation for every form of animal.

Lyell had also theorised that changes in flora and fauna might be explained by their isolation in separate and different ecological circumstances. When Darwin got to the Galapagos Islands, six hundred miles into the Pacific off the South American coast, he saw proof of this.

Here almost every product of the land and water bears the unmistakable stamp of the American continent. There are 26 land birds… the close affinity of most of these birds to American species in every character, in their habits, gestures, tones of voices, was manifest… why should this be so?

Darwin rejected the possibility of independent creation.

He also noted the behaviour of animals he saw on the Galapagos and Falkland islands. On the former the birds were largely unafraid of man, and the iguana, for instance, was more afraid of the sea, where its natural predators lived. On the Falklands there were tame foxes and geese that could not fly. It occurred to Darwin that these were successful