Major Leonard Darwin (15 January 1850 – 26 March 1943), a son of the English naturalist Charles Darwin, was variously a soldier, politician, economist, eugenicist and mentor of the statistician and evolutionary biologist Ronald Fisher.
Leonard Darwin was born in 1850 in Down House in Kent, England into the wealthy Darwin-Wedgwood family. He was the fourth son and eighth child of the naturalist Charles Darwin and his wife Emma (née Wedgwood), and the last of Darwin's immediate offspring to die. He considered himself the least intelligent of their children (brothers Frank, George and Horace were all elected Fellows of the Royal Society). He was sent to Clapham School in 1862.
Darwin joined the Royal Engineers in 1871. Between 1877 and 1882 he worked for the Intelligence Division of the Ministry of War. He went on several scientific expeditions, including those to observe the Transits of Venus in 1874 and 1882.
In 1890, Darwin was promoted to the rank of major, but soon left the army and from 1892 to 1895 was a Liberal Unionist Member of Parliament (MP) for Lichfield constituency in Staffordshire, where his grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood II, had also been an MP. He wrote vigorously on the economic issues of the day, bimetallism, Indian currency reform and municipal trading.