Like many other naturalists, Charles Darwin did not find the finches to be very interesting. During his five-week visit to the Galapagos Islands, Darwin saw many finches and collected some of them, but they were so different in outward appearance that he failed to recognize that they all came from the same family. Instead, he initially called one a finch, another a blackbird, and another a grosbeak. After his return to England, the ornithologist John Gould (1839), who analyzed and described Darwin’s ornithological collection, convinced Darwin that the finches merited more interest. In the first edition of the Voyage of the Beagle (1839), Darwin noted the similarities among the finches (see Plate XXXIV).

The biological importance of the finches had made an impression on Darwin in the years since his brief encounter with them: “These birds are the most singular of any in the archipelago,” but in most respects of form and function, they remained uninteresting. Nevertheless, the beaks of the various species did capture Darwin’s (1839c) attention: “It is very remarkable that a nearly perfect gradation of structure in this one group can be traced in the form of the beak, from one exceeding in dimensions that of the largest gros-beak, to another differing but little from that of a warbler.”