CHARLES DARWIN. 89 



changed, but not possibly at least not possibly much 

 between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-eight the 

 bony case itself. 



Changes there were, great changes, changes bodily, 

 changes mental. Of the bodily frame, namely, there was 

 that most sad and serious change the change of health. 

 " For nearly forty years Charles Darwin never knew one 

 day of the health of ordinary men." It seems pretty 

 certain that this was a consequence of the voyage. While 

 on the Beagle he had suffered almost constantly from sea- 

 sickness ; and a peculiar illness which he had in South 

 America may have added its quota to the bad effects of 

 the sickness. Darwin himself, later in life, seemed rather 

 to think of " hereditary fault ; " but we hear of no such 

 fault either in father or in mother. That father and grand- 

 father might have suffered at times from a " sense of 

 fatigue," was not possibly a consequence of hereditary 

 fault, surely ; if for nothing but their enormous bulk ; 

 while the sea-sickness was a certain fact. His shipmates 

 write strongly of it ; and his own letters, even the latest, 

 are explicit in complaint. His very Journal, as printed, 

 almost concludes thus : "If a person suffer much from 

 sea-sickness, let him weigh it heavily in the balance. I 

 speak from experience : it is no trifling evil, cured in a 

 week." 



But let there be doubt in any way of the cause, there 

 can be no doubt of the fact of the illness. After his 

 return, again to say it, for the rest of his life, Charles 

 Darwin never knew a day of ordinary health. The 

 slightest thing excited him ; and the slightest excitement 

 threw him as into collapse, with shivering, vomiting, and 

 agonising headache for forty-eight hours. They who 

 know can tell us that there are those, not otherwise 

 infirm, who suffer periodically thus. Emerson was one 

 of them perhaps Hegel perhaps Plato. Darwin was 



