2 3 8 LIFE OF DARWIN 



concerned, simply a blank. Verse-making, and learn- 

 ing by heart so many lines of Latin or Greek, seem 

 to have been the occupations of school that specially 

 dwelt in his memory, the sole pleasure he could recall 

 being the reading of some of Horace's Odes. He 

 describes, however, the intense satisfaction with which 

 he followed the clear geometrical proofs of Euclid, 

 and the pleasure he took in sitting for hours in an 

 old window of the school reading Shakespeare. He 

 made acquaintance, too, with the poems of Thomson, 

 Byron and Scott, but confesses that in later life, to 

 his great regret, he lost all pleasure from poetry of 

 any kind, even from Shakespeare. 



The first book that excited in him a wish to travel 

 was a copy of the Wonders of the World in the 

 possession of a schoolfellow, which he read with some 

 critical discrimination, for he used to dispute with other 

 boys about the veracity of its statements. Nothing in 

 the school-life could daunt his ardour in the pursuit 

 of natural history. He continued to be a collector, 

 and began to show himself an attentive observer of 

 insects and birds. White's Selborne, which has started 

 so many naturalists on their career, stimulated his 

 zeal, and he became so fond of birds as to wonder 

 in his mind why every gentleman did not become an 

 ornithologist. Nor were his interests confined to the 

 biological departments of Nature. With his brother, 

 who had made a laboratory in the garden tool-house, 

 he worked hard at chemistry, and learned for the first 

 time the meaning of experimental research. These 

 extra-scholastic pursuits, which he declares to have been 

 the best part of his education at school, came somehow 



