A special visitor...

In 1836, a young man - 27 years old - arrived in Simon's Town on a ship named HMS Beagle. During the 19 days that the Beagle was anchored in Simon's Bay, the young man went ashore to meet someone far more famous than he was. The young man was Charles Darwin. His famous host was astronomer Sir John Herschel. 

The discussions they shared were so influential to Darwin's approach to scientific investigation - and therefore to his thinking about evolution - that he later wrote: "These facts... seemed to throw some light on the origin of species - that mystery of mysteries..."  

The young man would go on to eclipse his mentor, and produce his ground-breaking Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, which was published as On the Origin of Species, some 20 years later in 1859. 

Darwin's visit to the Cape has now been commemorated in Simon's Town by the placement of a bust on the town pier. The closing paragraph of his ground-breaking book is engraved onto the side of the memorial.

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been equally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

From those early beginnings...