CHARLES DARWIN—WEISMANN. 435 
man but an eager observer, especially of birds, for at that time he 
wondered “in his simplicity” that every gentleman was not an 
ornithologist, so much was he attracted by what he observed of the 
habits of birds. 
The school which he began to attend at Shrewsbury in his ninth 
year was probably very similar to our earlier gymnasia. Darwin 
himself maintained that nothing could have been worse for his 
intellectual development than this purely classical school, in which 
nothing was taught, in addition to the ancient languages, except a 
little ancient history and geography. 
Darwin had no talent for languages, and no pleasure in them. So 
he remained a very mediocre scholar, and his father therefore re- 
moved him from school in his sixteenth year, and sent him to the 
University of Edinburgh to study medicine. 
The condition of the English universities at that time must have 
left much to be desired, for Darwin characterizes the majority of 
the lectures as terribly dull, and the time spent in attending them 
as lost. Moreover, anatomy disgusted him, and the tedium of the 
geological lectures repelled him so that he vowed never again to open 
a book on geology, a resolution which, happily, he did not adhere to. 
In his student days, as in his school time, he roamed about in the 
open air, sometimes shooting, sometimes riding, sometimes making 
long expeditions afoot. But even then he was not a conscious ob- 
server of nature, not a naturalist, but rather a lover of the beauty of 
nature and a collector of all sorts of natural objects, though he col- 
lected still, as he had done at school, rather from the collecting im- 
pulse frequently characteristic of youth than from any real scientific 
interest. If he had had that interest his chief passion would not 
have been the shooting of birds. His friends even found him one 
day making a knot in a string attached to his buttonhole for every 
bird he succeeded in bringing down! Thus he must have been 
mainly a sportsman, a hunting fanatic whose chief desire was to 
bring down as many birds as possible in a day. However, this de- 
votion to sport must have stood him in good stead later, especially 
on his great journey, for through it he not only acquired the tech- 
nique of shooting, but he sharpened his naturally acute powers of 
observation. 
He remained two years in Edinburgh, and then entered the Uni- 
versity of Cambridge. His father, who had observed his disinclina- 
tion for medicine, proposed that he should study theology, and 
Darwin knew himself so little that he was quite willing to agree to 
the proposal. He examined himself very conscientiously to see 
whether he was able to subscribe to the dogmas of the Anglican 
Church, and he came to the conclusion that he could accept as truth 
every word that the Bible contained, This was certainly remarkable, 
