CHARLES DARWIN. 77 



paper, and John Ruskin acted as Secretary of the Geological 

 Section. 



In his quiet, comfortable home he sat at the feet of the ' Great 

 Mother,' looking steadfastly into her countenance until he read 

 the inmost secrets of her heart, and wrested from her the hidden 

 evidence of the grandest and most sublime miracle, natural and 

 yet Divine, that she has ever given to man. There, in spite of ill- 

 health, brought on by perpetual sea-sickness during the Beagle 

 voyage, from which he never recovered, he worked steadily and 

 patiently on among his fowls and pigeons, his plants and insects, 

 seeing how the worms liked candle-lights and pianos, how pitcher- 

 plants greedily devoured unwary insect intruders, and the like. To 

 bed at lo p.m. and up at 5 a.m., he was very often at work by 8 

 a.m., after an early walk and breakfast. I need not say that he 

 worked by system. No man could have accomplished that 40 

 years' labour except by this plan. " In preparing all his books he 

 had a special set of shelves for each, standing on or near his 

 writing-table, a shelf being devoted to the material destined for 

 each chapter." With all his work he invariably devoted part of 

 every evening to sitting with his family, chatting over various sub- 

 jects, or listening to the novel read aloud by Mrs. Darwin or one 

 of the children. He was no less great as husband and father than 

 he was as scientist and philosopher. To his patient and loving 

 instruction his sons, George and Francis, owe much of their 

 present success and undoubted ability in research. 



Before I refer briefly to his services in the different sciences, it 

 will be well to remove one or two misconceptions that exist con- 

 cerning him in the popular mind, at all events, and to see also what 

 was the state of things in respect of evolutionary science at the 

 time when he astonished the whole civilised world by the issue of 

 his Origin of Species. Many people regard Darwin as the 

 founder of the great evolutionary hypothesis. They believe that 

 he was the first to arrive at the idea of all plant and animal forms 

 being the outcome of slow modification of pre-existing types, and 

 not of 'special creation.' They believe, too, that he first 

 propounded the theory which supposes that man can \^q physically 

 and anatomically traced back through remote ages to an ancestry 

 more or less akin to the Anthropoid apes. He was not the 



