CHARLES DARWIN. 105 



is his own son who speaks, " that he got a kind of satis- 

 faction in reading articles which he could not understand. 

 For instance, he used to read nearly the whole of 

 Nature, though so much of it deals with mathematics 

 and physics." But that means the " good young man," too, 

 who for " self -improvement " has interest in, and would 

 have a try at, everything on earth that gives marks. He 

 actually, as he says himself, "paid some attention to 

 metaphysical subjects ! " " But," he admits, " I was not 

 well fitted for such studies." "I would never have 

 succeeded with metaphysics or mathematics ; " " facts 

 compel me to conclude that my brain was never formed 

 for much thinking." All the more do we see here, even 

 in such attempts, a proof of his natural tenacity. He 

 was tenacious in his hospital attendance ; he was tena- 

 cious in his shooting. It was tenacity made him 

 silent on his palpitations of the heart before the ship 

 sailed : at all hazards, he simply would go. It was in the 

 same mood that he wrote to his sister, " I daresay you 

 expect I shall turn back at the Madeira ; if I have a 

 morsel of stomach left, I won't give up." He asks Mr. 

 Wallace once (iii. 94), such and such questions being put, 

 " what would you answer ? " and adds, " I could not answer, 

 but should maintain my ground" So, when Huxley 

 " demurs to his discussion on Classification, and says he 

 has nailed his colours to the mast," Mr. Darwin can only 

 set his teeth and (jokingly) declare, " I will sooner die 

 than give up " (ii. 243). It is he himself, too, who says 

 of himself, " I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of 

 other men." And his son says of him, "It was his 

 instinctive love of making out a difficulty which to a 

 great extent kept him at work so patiently "- -" he could 

 not bear to be beaten " " he often quoted the saying, 

 ' It's dogged as does it,' and I think doggedness expresses 

 his frame of mind almost better than perseverance." He 



