114 DARWINIANISM. 



is an affair of the eyes shallow, so far, and on the sur- 

 face ; but ideas, and their expression no less, spring rather 

 from the depth the cerebral depth of the ears. The 

 most magistral of bards have sung the griefs of the blind : 

 but there are no poets of the deaf. The deaf cannot sing. 

 The stir of a beetle in the dust was the first stir that 

 arrested the interest of a Darwin : the convulsion of a 

 continent was possibly the last. Charles Darwin was a 

 naturalist and a geologist ; and he was on the general 

 level implied nothing else. The evidence of this is 

 ample, discounting, that is, all that material, exceptional 

 and by the way, which we have just signalised in the 

 Journal " He certainly had a bad ear for vocal sounds." 

 This (i. 126) is the emphatic testimony of his own son. 

 Mr. Darwin himself intimates once, a little latish in life 

 (iii. 315) : " The only approach to work which I can do 

 is to look " as it was then " at tendrils and climbers." 

 It was the " movements of plants " (" the job which I 

 have in hand ") constituted the stir which attracted his 

 eyes at that moment (iii. 332). " This," he adds, "does 

 not distress my weakened brain." "From my earliest 

 youth," he says elsewhere, " I have had the strongest 

 desire to understand or explain whatever I olserved." 

 We have seen already how he was absorbed into his 

 beetles ; and we have heard it already that then, as a 

 boy (i. 35), "he took much pleasure in watching birds." 

 Despite his very genuine and deep-seated modesty, he 

 can admit to his own credit this little (i. 103): "I 

 think I am superior to the common run of men in 

 noticing things my industry has been nearly as great as 

 it could have been in tlie, collection and observation of facts!' 

 His first discovery, and his first scientific paper, con- 

 cerned movement (i. 39): "I made one interesting little 

 discovery, and read a paper on the subject that the so- 

 called ova of Flustra had the power of independent 



