THE BOYHOOD OF DARWIN. 209 



My mother died in July, 1817, when I was a little over eight years 

 old, and it is odd that I can remember hardly anything about her 

 except her death-bed, her black-velvet gown, and her curiously-con- 

 structed work-table. In the spring of this same year I was sent to a 

 day-school in Shrewsbury, where I stayed a year. I have been told 

 that I was much slower in learning than my younger sister Catherine, 

 and I believe that I was in many ways a naughty boy. 



By the time I went to this day-school * my taste for natural history, 

 and more especially for collecting, was well developed. I tried to 

 make out the names of plants,f and collected all sorts of things — shells, 

 seals, francs, coins, and minerals. The passion for collecting which 

 leads a man to be a systematic naturalist, a virtuoso, or a miser, was 

 very strong in me, and was clearly innate, as none of my sisters or 

 brother ever had this taste. 



One little event during this year has fixed itself very firmly in my 

 mind, and I hope that it has done so from my conscience having been 

 afterward sorely troubled by it ; it is curious as showing that appar- 

 ently I was interested at this early age in the variability of plants ! I 

 told another little boy ( I believe it was Leighton, who afterward be- 

 came a well-known lichenologist and botanist ) that I could produce 

 variously-colored polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with 

 certain colored fluids, which was of course a monstrous fable, and had 

 never been tried by me. I may here also confess that as a little boy I 

 was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always 

 done for the sake of causing excitement. For instance, I once gathered 

 much valuable fruit from my father's trees and hid it in the shrubbery, 

 and then ran in breathless haste to spread the news that I had discov- 

 ered a hoard of stolen fruit. 



I must have been a very simple little fellow when I first went to 

 the school. A boy of the name of Garnett took me into a cake-shop 

 one day, and bought some cakes for which he did not pay, as the shop- 

 man trusted him. When we came out I asked him why he did not pay 

 for them, and he instantly answered, *' Why, do you not know that my 

 uncle left a great sum of money to the town on condition that every 



* Kept by Kev. G. Case, minister of the Unitarian Chapel in the Iligh Street. Mrs, 

 Darwin was a Unitarian and attended 3Ir. Case's chapel, and my father, as a little boj-, 

 went there with his elder sisters. But both he and his brother were christened and in- 

 tended to belong to the Church of England ; and after his early boyhood he seems usu- 

 ally to have gone to church and not to Mr. Case's. It appears (" St. James's Gazette," 

 December 15, 1883) that a mural tablet has been erected to his memory in the chapel, 

 which is now known as the " Free Christian Church." 



f Rev. W. A. Leighton, who was a schoolfellow of my father's at Mr. Case's school, 

 remembers his bringing a flower to school and saying that his mother had taught him 

 how, by looking at the inside of the blossom, the name of the plant could be discovered. 

 Mr. Leighton goes on, " This greatly roused my attention and curiosity, and I inquired of 

 him repeatedly how this could be done ? " — but his lesson was, naturally enough, not 

 transmissible. 



VOL. XXXII. — 14 



