112 DARWINIANISM. 



Lyell himself. There may be a certain biplicity of 

 kindness and courtesy in Mr. Darwin ; but there is no 

 duplicity of his essential manhood and truth. With 

 whatever delicacy of foliage, he is still the oak. 



If without " any serious amount of thought," then, as 

 his son says, Mr. Darwin was still so much one of his 

 countrymen that he must be a party politician and firm. 

 It coheres with the more philosophical political ideas on 

 his part in the Journal that, at p. 295 of this book, when 

 speaking of the Indians in the district of Cucao, on the 

 west coast of Chiloe, we have, sympathetically, this from 

 him : " These Indians end all their complaints by saying, 

 ' And it is only because we are poor Indians, and know 

 nothing ; but it was not so when we had a king.' " 



It belongs to the general consideration here also to 

 notice that, with whatever grave intellectual views, there 

 was in Darwin, in these days, a vein of humour as well. 

 There are several passages in the Journal to prove this. 

 I shall only mention the one, however, in the perusal of 

 which I had actually to give vent to an irrepressible 

 guffaw. It concerns an anecdote related by Mr. Darwin 

 in reference to an amusing circumstance that occurred 

 to him and his attendants when they were at a great 

 height on the Andes. " At the place where we slept," 

 says Mr. Darwin, p. 324, "water necessarily boiled, 

 from the diminished pressure of the atmosphere, at a 

 lower temperature than it does in a less lofty country. 

 Hence the potatoes, after remaining for some hours in 

 the boiling water, were nearly as hard as ever. The 

 pot was left on the fire all night, and next morning it 

 was boiled again, but yet the potatoes were not cooked. 

 I found out this by overhearing my two companions 

 discussing the cause ; they had come to the simple con- 

 clusion ' that the cursed pot (which was a new one) did 

 not choose to boil potatoes.' " 



