CHARLES DARWIN. 121 



able to see any meaning in the early steps in algebra 

 I do not believe that I should ever have succeeded 

 beyond a very low grade." His friend Herbert (i. 171) 

 gives similar testimony : " He had, I imagine, no natural 

 turn for mathematics, and he gave up his mathematical 

 reading before he had mastered the first part of algebra, 

 having had a special quarrel with Surds and the Binomial 

 Theorem." Algebra, as so impalpable, might very well 

 have proved impracticable to Mr. Darwin; but why 

 should he not have been at home in Geometry ? He had 

 " intense satisfaction " in Euclid, he says : there were 

 things, shapes, to look at there, had there been but some 

 movement in them, as there is in beetles ! Mr. Darwin 

 is mournful at times over his own deficiencies as (ii. 150) 

 to his friend Fox : " facts compel me to conclude that my 

 brain was never formed for much thinking." Yet his 

 tenacity was such that by diligence and assiduity he 

 could take into his memory though only for the moment 

 pretty well whatever he pleased as indeed we have 

 already seen. Thus (i. 22) he could learn, " with great 

 facility, forty or fifty lines of Virgil or Homer while in 

 morning chapel," but " every verse was forgotten in 

 forty-eight hours ! " So it was also that, as we have seen, 

 requiring to go to Cambridge, and finding that he " had 

 actually forgotten, incredible as it may appear, almost 

 everything which he had learnt, even to some few of the 

 Greek letters," he yet soon contrived to recover his 

 " school-standard of knowledge," and otherwise so to 

 prepare himself as to pass, very creditably and re-- 

 spectably, his various examinations. 



We hear of him reading " a little of Gibbon's history 

 in the morning ; " but there is no evidence of even as 

 much as that abiding with him. He is in effect always 

 to be found lamenting his unfortunate incapacity for 

 what we may call book-work or indoors head-work. 



