270 OBITUARY x 
of an intelligent collector and note-taker. He was 
fully conscious of the fact, and his ambition hardly 
rose above the hope that he should bring back 
materials for the scientific “lions” at home of 
sufficient excellence to prevent them from turning 
and rending him. (I. p. 248.) i 
But a fourth educational experiment was to be 
tried. This time Nature took him in hand herself 
and showed him the way by which, to borrow 
Henslow’s prophetic phrase, “anything he pleased 
might be done.” | 
The conditions of life presented by a ship-of-war 
of only 242 tons burthen, would not, primd facie, 
appear to be so favourable to intellectual develop- 
ment as those offered by the cloistered retirement 
of Christ’s College. Darwin had not even a cabin 
to himself; while, in addition to the hindrances: 
and interruptions incidental to sea-life, which can 
be appreciated only by those who have had 
experience of them, sea-sickness came on whenever 
the little ship was “lively”; and, considering the 
circumstances of the cruise, that must have been 
her normal state. Nevertheless, Darwin found on 
board the “Beagle” that which neither the 
pedagogues of Shrewsbury, nor the professoriate 
of Edinburgh, nor the tutors of Cambridge had 
managed to give him. “I have always felt that I 
owe to the voyage the first real training or 
education of my mind (I. p. 61); ” and in a letter 
written as he was leaving England, he calls the 
