X OBITUARY 257 



an extemporised laboratory, in which he was per- 

 mitted to assist by his elder brother, kept him 

 late at work, and earned him the nickname of 

 " gas " among his schoolfellows. And there could 

 have been no insensibility to literature in one 

 who, as a boy, could sit for hours reading Shake- 

 speare, Milton, Scott, and Byron; who greatly 

 admired some of the Odes of Horace ; and who, 

 in later years, on board the " Beagle," when only 

 one book could be carried on an expedition, 

 chose a volume of Milton for his companion. 



Industry, intellectual interests, the capacity for 

 taking pleasure in deductive reasoning, in obser- 

 vation, in experiment, no less than in the highest 

 works of imagination : where these qualities are 

 present any rational system of education should 

 surely be able to make something of them. Un- 

 fortunately for Darwin, the Shrewsbury Grammar 

 School, though good of its kind, was an institution 

 of a type universally prevalent in this country half 

 a century ago, and by no means extinct at the 

 present day. The education given was " strictly 

 classical," "especial attention" being "paid to 

 verse-making," while all other subjects, except a 

 little ancient geography and history, were ignored. 

 Whether, as in some famous English schools at that 

 date and much later, elementary arithmetic was 

 also left out of sight does not appear ; but the 

 instruction in Euclid which gave Charles Darwin 

 so much satisfaction was certainly supplied by a 



