2 6o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SKETCH OF CHAELES E. DAE WIN, LL.D. 



ME. DAE WIN died at his home, Down House, near Orpington, 

 England, April 19th. He had been suffering for some time 

 from weakness of the heart, but continued to work till the last. He 

 was taken ill, after having enjoyed an apparent improvement, on the 

 day before his death, with pains in the chest, faintness, and nausea, 

 from which he never recovered. 



Mr. Darwin inherited his scientific tastes from two successive gen- 

 erations of ancestors, and has transmitted them to some of his chil- 

 dren. His grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, was a distinguished 

 botanist, and was the author of a poem " The Botanic Garden," the 

 merits of which are decidedly more botanical than poetical, but which 

 has a place in English literature ; and of the " Zoonomia, or the Laws 

 of Organic Life," a work in which the theory of development was 

 plainly foreshadowed. His father, Dr. Eobert Waring Darwin, was 

 a Fellow of the Eoyal Society. His grandfather on the mother's side 

 was the celebrated Josiah Wedgwood, whose name is intimately asso- 

 ciated with the Wedgwood earthenware. 



Charles Eobert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England, 

 February 12, 1809, and received a preparatory education at the gram- 

 mar-school of that place, under the head-mastership of Dr. Samuel 

 Butler, author of one of the old standard text-books on geography, 

 and afterward Bishop of Litchfield and Coventry. He entered the 

 University of Edinburgh when sixteen years old, and two years later, 

 in 1827, went to Christ's College, Cambridge, whence he was gradu- 

 ated Bachelor of Arts four years afterward. The most that is known 

 definitely of his special pursuits at these institutions is that at Edin- 

 burgh he gave some attention to marine zoology, and read his first sci- 

 entific paper, " On the Movement of the Ova of Frustra " before the 

 Plinian Society, and that at Cambridge he was especially interested 

 in botany. 



His Majesty's ships Adventure and Beagle had returned in 1830 

 from a four years' survey of the coasts of Patagonia and Terra del 

 Fuego. Captain Fitzroy, of the Beagle, had gained so much credit by 

 his efficiency as an officer and the value of the observations he re- 

 corded, that, he easily obtained a commission to return to the South 

 American waters on another and more extensive exploring expedition. 

 Before going he made a public offer to give up a part of his own cabin 

 to any competent naturalist who would accompany him. Darwin saw 

 the notice, and at once offered his services without salary, on the condi- 

 tion that he should be given the disposition of his collections. He was 

 accepted, and thus obtained, when twenty-two years old, " what would 

 be considered a prize by any naturalist of double his age." The expe- 

 dition, with Darwin as one of its members, sailed on the 27th of Novem- 



