426 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 
1831; that of M. A. in 1887, after his return from South 
America. 
It is said that Darwin was a keen fox-hunter in his youth, 
—not a bad pursuit for the cultivation of the observing pow- 
ers. There is good authority for the statement — though it 
has nowhere been made in print — that at Cambridge he was 
disposed at one time to make the Church his profession, fol- 
lowing the example of Buckland and of his teacher, Sedg- 
wick. But in 1831, just as he was taking his bachelor’s de- 
gree, Captain Fitzroy offered to receive into his own cabin 
any naturalist who was disposed to accompany him in the 
Beagle’s surveying voyage round the world. Mr. Darwin 
volunteered his services without salary, with the condition 
only that he should have the disposal of his own collections. 
And this expedition of nearly five years — from the latter 
part of September, 1831, to the close of October, 1836 — not 
only fixed the course and character of the young naturalist’s 
life-work, but opened to his mind its principal problems and 
suggested the now familiar solution of them. For he brought 
back with him to England a conviction that the existing spe- 
cies of animals and plants are the modified descendants of 
earlier forms, and that the internecine struggle for life in 
which these modifiable forms must have been engaged would 
scientifically explain the changes. The noteworthy point is 
that both the conclusion and the explanation were the legiti- 
mate outcome of real scientific investigation. It is an equally 
noteworthy fact, and a characteristic of Darwin’s mind, that 
these pregnant ideas were elaborated for more than twenty 
years before he gave them to the world. Offering fruit so 
well ripened upon the bough, commending the conclusions he 
had so thoroughly matured by the presentation of very various 
lines of facts, and of reasonings close to the facts, unmixed 
with figments and & priori conceptions, it is not so surprising 
that his own convictions should at the close of the next twenty 
years be generally shared by scientific men. It is certainly 
gratifying that he should have lived to see it, and also have 
outlived most of the obloquy and dread which the promulga- 
tion of these opinions aroused. 
