44 



THE NEXT GENERATION 



world and run the risk of being captured. By night, there- 

 fore, Darwin not only watched their operation in his flower- 

 pots, but he also took his lantern and went into the fields to 

 find them. Sometimes they raised themselves on their taper- 

 ing, bent-over ends and seemed to be giving strict attention ; 

 sometimes they shrank back into their burrows as if the light 

 on their bodies gave unpleasant sensations. Darwin watched 

 them as they seized leaves and drew them down to stop up 

 the mouths of their burrows. He saw how 

 they saved their lives and lost them ; how 

 they did their burrowing ; how they gathered 

 food and used it ; how they survived the winter 

 rolled up in balls underground. 



For years the study went on, and no doubt 

 it had really begun years earlier, when Darwin 

 went a-fishing as a boy, for he writes : " I had 

 a strong taste for angling, and would sit for 

 any number of hours on the bank of a river or 

 pond watching the float. I was told that I 

 could kill worms with salt and water, and from 

 that day I never spitted a live worm, though at the expense, 

 probably, of some loss of success." 



This, then, is our introduction to the boy who was to become 

 one of the world's most famous naturalists the man who was 

 to change certain beliefs of men for all future generations. No 

 student of inheritance consents to be ignorant about Darwin. 

 The work of his life lies between the time when, as a boy, 

 he salted angleworms to save them from pain on his fish- 

 hook by day, and when, as an aged man, he studied angle- 

 worms by night for knowledge of their habits. It also appears 

 that from the beginning of his life until it ended, Darwin's 

 work knit itself together as two parts. 



