CHARLES DARWIN. 78 



He was the second son, the eldest being Erasmus, the friend of 

 Carlyle, who " preferred him to his brother Charles for intellect ! " 

 Erasmus died in 1881. 



Josiah Wedgwood, potter, artist, chemist, road-maker, and 

 school-builder, was a man of enormous energy and wonderful 

 activity, and he possessed that which Carlyle has defined 

 genius to consist of — />., " the infinite capacity for taking 

 pains." Speaking of him and of Erasmus Darwin, the elder, Mr. 

 Grant Allen says : " Is it not probable that in their joint descen- 

 dant the brilliant but discursive and hazardous genius of Erasmus 

 Darwin was balanced and regulated by soberer qualities inherited 

 directly from the profound industry of the painstaking potter? 

 When later on, we find Darwin spending hours in noting the suc- 

 cessive movements of the tendrils in a plant, or watching for long 

 years the habits and manners of earth-worms in flower-pots, may 

 we not reasonably conjecture that he derived no little share of his 

 extraordinary patience, carefulness, and minuteness of handicraft 

 from his mother's father, Josiah Wedgwood ? " 



Charles Darwin was educated at Shrewsbury Grammar School 

 under Dr. Butler, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield. Here he made 

 little mark, and he afterwards looked back on the time spent there 

 as almost wasted, the main portion of it being given to classics, 

 which he very cordially disliked. " Siim^ Fui^ Esse,^' were not to 

 his taste, and the little of Euclid which he mastered he used to 

 regard as the only real education he obtained at Shrewsbury. 



In 1825, when 16 years of age, he went to Edinburgh Uni- 

 versity for two years. Up to this time his only passion seems to 

 have been one for "collecting." Eggs, shells, seals, minerals, 

 coins, etc., etc., were assiduously gathered and purchased. At 

 Edinburgh, where he was sent to begin a course of medical educa- 

 tion, the first definite evidence of the bent of his life asserted 

 itself There, on the shores of the Firth of Forth, on the Fife- 

 shire coast, and in the islands round about, he pursued natural 

 science studies with great eagerness, gathering information on 

 every hand both in Botany and Zoology. It was while at Edin- 

 burgh that Darwin made his first recorded discovery in science. 

 He found organs of motion in the floating ova of the common 

 Fltcstra, or sea-mat, and read a paper on his discovery at the 



