6 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. [ch. ii. 



anything about her except her deathbed, her black velvet 

 gown, and her curiously constructed work-table. In the 

 spring of this same year I was sent to a day-school in 

 Shrewsbury, where I stayed a year. I have been told that I 

 was much slower in learning than my younger sister Cath- 

 erine, and I believe that I was in many ways a naughty boy. 



By the time I went to this day-school* my taste for 

 natural history, and more especially for collecting, was well 

 developed. I tried to make out the names of plants, and 

 collected all sorts of things, shells, seals, franks, coins, and 

 minerals. The passion for collecting which leads a man to 

 be a systematic naturalist, a virtuoso, or a miser, was very 

 strong in me, and was clearly innate, as none of my sisters 

 or brother ever had this taste. 



One little event during this year has fixed itself very 

 firmly in my mind, and I hope that it has done so from my 

 conscience having been afterwards sorely troubled by it; 

 it is curious as showing that apparently I was interested at 

 this early age in the variability of plants ! I told another 

 little boy (I believe it was Leighton,f who afterwards be- 

 came a well-known lichenologist and botanist), that I could 

 produce variously coloured polyanthuses and primroses by 

 watering them with certain coloured fluids, which was of 

 course a monstrous fable, and had never been tried by me. 

 I may here also confess that as a little boy I was much given 

 to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done 

 for the sake of causing excitement. JFor instance, I once 

 gathered much valuable fruit from my father's trees and 

 hid it in the shrubbery, and then ran in breathless haste to 

 spread the news that I had discovered a hoard of stolen 

 fruit. | 



* Kept by Eev. G. Case, minister of the Unitarian Chapel in the High 

 Street. Mrs.' Darwin was a Unitarian and attended Mr. Case's chapel, and 

 my father as a little boy went there with his elder sisters. But both he and 

 his brother were christened and intended to belong to the Church of Eng- 

 land ; and after his early boyhood he seems usually to have gone to church 

 and not to Mr. Case's, 'it appears (St. James's Gazette, December 15, 1883) 

 that a mural tablet has been erected to his memory in the chapel, which is 

 now known as the " Free Christian Church." F ; D. 



+ Rev. W. A. Leighton remembers his bringing a flower to school and say- 

 ing that his mother had taught him how by looking at the inside of the blos- 

 som the name of the plant could be discovered. Mr. Leighton goes on, " This 

 greatly roused my attention and curiosity, and I inquired of him repeatedly 

 how this could be done ? " but his lesson was naturally enough not trans- 

 missible. F. D. 



% His father wisely treated this tendency not by making crimes of the 

 fibs, but by making light of the discoveries. F. D. 



