Sunday, March 22, 2009

What's wrong with this picture???


Isn't it amazing that school records from 1838 still exist for Darwin, but in this amazing age of record keeping none exist for Obama? I guess it's just one of those things that make you go...hmmm
Rees

Archives shed light on Darwin's student days

Sun Mar 22, 2009
By Peter Griffiths
from Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) - With someone to polish his shoes, make his bed and stoke the fire in his spacious rooms, Charles Darwin enjoyed the sort of pampered university life that today's debt-laden British students can only dream about.

Two hundred years after his birth, academics have uncovered new details of his comfortable existence at the University of Cambridge before he embarked on the grueling five-year voyage that would transform science's view of the world.

Six leather-bound ledgers unearthed in the university archives reveal how he lived in the most expensive rooms available to a student of his rank from 1828 to 1831.

He hired a battery of staff to help him with the daily chores, including a scullion (dishwasher), a laundress and a shoeblack (someone who cleans shoes).

A tailor, hatter and barber made sure he was well presented, while a chimney sweep and a coalman kept his fire going. He even paid five and a half pence extra each day to have vegetables with the basic ration of meat and beer at Christ's College.
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