202 THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



Fitzroy, Darwin was encouraged to believe that this 

 also might prove worthy of publication. 



Darwin's account of his adventures and manifold 

 observations is so informal, so rich in detail, as not 

 to admit of summary. His eye took in the most di- 

 verse phenomena, the color of the sea or of rivers, 

 clouds of butterflies and of locusts, the cacique with his 

 little boy clinging to the side of a horse in headlong 

 flight, the great earthquake on the coast of Chile, the 

 endless variety of plant and animal life, the supersti- 

 tion of savage and padre, the charms of Tahiti, the 

 unconscious humor of his mountain guides for whom 

 at an altitude of eleven thousand feet " the cursed 

 pot (which was a new one) did not choose to boil 

 potatoes " all found response in Darwin's open 

 mind ; everything was grist to his mill. Any selec- 

 tion from the richness of the original is almost sure 

 to show a tendency not obvious in the Journal. On 

 the other hand, it is just such multiplicity of phe- 

 nomena as the Journal mirrors that impels every 

 orderly mind to seek for causes, for explanation. 

 The human intellect cannot rest till law gives form 

 to the wild chaos of fact. 



No disciple of Lyell could fail to be convinced 

 of the immeasurable lapse of time required for the 

 formation of the earth's crust. For this principle 

 Darwin found abundant evidence during the years 

 spent in South America. On the heights of the Andes 

 he found marine shell fossils at a height of fourteen 

 thousand feet above sea-level. That such an eleva- 

 tion of submarine strata should be achieved by forces 

 still at Nature's command might well test the faith 

 of the most ardent disciple. Of how great those 



