A good deal of Charles Darwin’s endeavors were bound up with geography. First and foremost he followed in the steps of scientific geographer-travelers like Alexander von Humboldt when he embarked on his five-year round-the-world voyage on the Beagle in 1831. Later in life he recalled that during his final year at Cambridge he had “read with care and profound interest Humboldt’s Personal Narrative,” and he kept it constantly by his side throughout the Beagle mission, not just for its landscape evocations but for its scientific insights on subjects as diverse as polished syenitic rocks in the Orinoco, atmospheric conditions in the tropics, crocodile hibernation, connections between earthquakes and weather conditions, and miasmas in the torrid zone (Darwin 1958b, 67; Egerton 1970) (Fig. 44.1). Not surprisingly, shortly after his return home, he was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society in 1838, having been nominated by the British diplomat, traveler, and geologist, Woodbine Parish. J. Stuart Wortley, agriculturalist and politician, and the geologist Charles Lyell, added their signatures in support (Fig. 44.2). Later in 1840 he served for a year on the society’s council.

Beyond the external fabric of Darwin’s life and institutional affiliations, of course, Darwin, Darwinism, and geography have intersected in numerous other significant ways. Here I propose to take three cuts at the subject: I turn first to the role of geography in Darwin’s thinking and experience; then I trace something of the influence Darwin exerted on the geographical tradition; and finally, as an experiment with Darwinian resonance, I suggest that Darwinism itself might well be considered an intellectual species that endured different fortunes in different cultural environments and thus displayed its own geographical distribution.