THE INDIVIDUALITY OF CHARLES DARWIN 347 



days to the end of his university life, a person set apart for individual 

 preparation for a special and peculiar career. Wlien he bade farewell 

 to Christ's College, Cambridge, in the summer of 1831, his actual 

 education was yet to be acquired, but not through human instruction. 

 He has himself declared : " I have always felt that I owe to the voyage 

 the first real training or education of my mind.'* 



It was therefore no professional scientist who eagerly accepted the 

 unsalaried post of naturalist to the Beagle expedition around the world, 

 but a modest, though confident, youth of twenty-two whose most impor- 

 tant article of outfit 'was the first volume of the first edition of Lyell's 

 " Principles of Geology," which had been published the year before, the 

 second volume of which was not issued until after Darwin had reached 

 South America. Thus it was providentially ordered that during the 

 formative period covered by this epoch-making voyage, Darwin should 

 remain as free as possible from human influences. If, instead of 

 proceeding, raw as he was, directly from the seclusion of the university 

 to the isolation of the voyage, he had directed his steps to the metrop- 

 olis and had there mingled with the leaders in scientific thought, 

 it is quite possible, if not probable, that he would have fallen under 

 their authority and would have accepted the orthodox beliefs of his 

 time. If that had been the case, we might be dominated to-day by 

 the prohibitive doctrine of the immutability of species, instead of enjoy- 

 ing that freedom of thought and liberty of investigation to which 

 Darwin made us heirs. But, happily for the intellectual world, during 

 the five years which Darwin spent on the Beagle, under the intimate 

 tutelage of mother nature, he laid, for our benefit, as well as for his 

 own, the solid foundations of that never-failing habit of mind in which 

 open-eyed teachableness ever supplemented unwavering honesty of pur- 

 pose and fearlessness of approach. 



After Darwin's return from the circumnavigation of the globe, he 

 resided, for a little more than five years, in London, and that was the 

 only portion of his life during which he was in actual personal contact 

 with any considerable number of his fellow men. Even then, however, 

 he was mostly engaged with his own thoughts, for he was arranging his 

 collections and preparing for publication the results of his observations 

 made while on the Beagle voyage. It was at the very beginning of this 

 residence in London (July, 1837), while the things he had seen in 

 South America and the Pacific Islands were still fresh in his memory 

 that he opened his first note-book for facts in relation to the origin of 

 species, about which he says he " had long reflected." For twenty-two 

 years thereafter Mr. Darwin continued to pursue this revolutionizing 

 subject with unexampled patience and, except as to two or three inti- 

 mate friends, entirely within the privacy of his own mind. 



In September, 1842, he went into retirement at Down, an out-of- 



