72 DARWINIAN ISM. 



oh, with what an unquiet conscience ever afterwards ; 

 With just such a conscience he recollects on one occasion 

 to have beaten a puppy ; but it is a very precious con- 

 solation to him to think that the puppy did not howl ; s< > 

 that, manifestly, he could not have struck it at all hard ! 

 A tricky little urchin, all the same, he must have been 

 at times, and with an amusing little ingenuity of his 

 own. He once told another little boy that he could 

 produce variously coloured polyanthuses and primroses by 

 watering them with certain coloured fluids which was, 

 of course, he interjects, " a monstrous fable, and had never 

 been tried by me." Another time, he hid in the shrub- 

 bery a lot of fruit he had taken from the trees, and then 

 rail in breathless haste to spread the news that he had 

 disco veied a hoard of stolen fruit. " I believe," moans 

 Mr. Darwin, " that I was in many ways a naughty boy ! " 

 We see already in the mention of insects, eggs, 

 flowers signs here, even in childhood, of deep-seated 

 enthusiasm for natural history. By the time he was 

 eight years old, he tried to make out the names of 

 plants, and collected all sorts of things, shells, seals, 

 franks, coins, and minerals. " The passion for collecting 

 was very strong in me," he says, " and was clearly 

 innate, as none of my sisters or brother had this taste." 

 " I must have observed insects with some little care," he 

 remarks ; " for, when ten years old I went for three weeks 

 to the sea-coast in Wales, I was very much interested 

 and surprised at seeing a large black and scarlet Hemi- 

 pterous insect, many moths (Zygaena) and a Cicindela, 

 which are not found in Shropshire." Das heisst obscr- 

 viren ! That is what it is to observe and at the age of 

 ten ! Still, in regard to minerals at that age, though he 

 continued collecting them with much zeal, he says, it was 

 " quite unscientifically all that I cared about was a 

 \\Q\\-named mineral, and I hardly attempted to classify 



