Book excerpt from The Philosophical Breakfast Club

On Monday, February 27, 1837, Charles Darwin delivered a talk at a meeting of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Darwin wrote to his sister Caroline that night with news of his success, happily reporting that two of the original founders of the society, Whewell and Sedgwick, had taken an active part in the discussion afterwards. Whewell, then president of the Geological Society, was so impressed that, less than two weeks later, he invited Darwin to serve as the organization’s secretary. The paper described one of Darwin’s discoveries during his recent voyage on the HMS Beagle: fused sand tubes found near the Rio Plata in South America. These tubes, formed when lightning struck loose sand, were useful, Darwin believed, in discovering how lightning enters the ground during an electrical storm. As he pointed out in his Voyage of the Beagle, published the following year, this area of South America was extremely subject ...