434 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 
How deep was the oblivion into which the philosophical conceptions 
of the beginning of the century had sunk by the middle of it may be 
gathered from the fact that in my own student days in the fifties I 
never heard a theory of descent referred to, and I found no mention 
of it in any book to which I had access. One of the most famous of 
my teachers, the gifted anatomist, J. Henle, had written as a motto 
under his picture, “ There is a virtue of renunciation, not in the 
domain of morality alone, but in that of intellect as well.” This sen- 
tence was entirely obscure to me as a student, because I knew nothing 
of the intellectual excesses of the “ Naturphilosophie,” and I only 
understood later, after the revival of interest in general problems, that 
this insistence upon the virtue of intellectual renunciation was in- 
tended as a counteractive to the over-speculations of that period. 
This was one-sided, but it was a necessary reaction from the one- 
sidedness in the opposite direction which had preceded it. 
The next swing of the pendulum was brought about by Charles 
Darwin in 1859 with his book on “ The Origin of Species.” 
Let us now consider the development of this remarkable man, and 
note the steps by which he attained to his life work. Charles Darwin 
was born on the 12th of February, 1809, the same year in which 
Lamarck published his “ Philosophie Zoologique.” But he had not 
sucked in the doctrines of that evolutionist, or of his own grandfather, 
Erasmus Darwin, with his mother’s milk. His youth fell within 
the period of the reaction from philosophical speculation, and he 
grew up wholly in the old ideas of the creation of species and their 
immutability. His birthplace was the little town of Shrewsbury, 
near the borders of Wales, where his father was a highly respected 
physician, well to do even according to English standards. 
If we think of Charles Darwin’s later achievements we are apt to 
suppose that the bent toward natural science must have been apparent 
in him at a very early age, but this was not the case, at least not to a 
degree sufficient to attract the attention of those about him. It is 
easy now, of course, to say that the pronounced hking for ranging 
about wood and field and collecting, quite unscientifically, plants, 
beetles, and minerals, foreshadowed the future naturalist. Even as 
a boy Darwin was an enthusiastic sportsman and an excellent shot, 
and the first snipe he brought down excited him so much that he was 
hardly able to reload.*. But he must have been not merely a sports- 
@T can say the same of myself for, although in my boyhood I did not shoot 
birds, I had a passion for butterfly hunting. When I saw the rare Limenitis 
populi resting on the ground in front of me for the first time, I became so ex- 
cited that I could not at first throw my net, and when I did throw it, though my 
aim was usually very accurate, I struck the butterfly obliquely over the wing 
with the iron ring of the net. The traces of this awkward aim are visible on 
the wing to this day, 
