138 DARWIXIAXISM. 



introduced to geology; and it , was practically, though 

 with reading of Lyell, that he continued its study in the 

 Beagle. He declared himself, in the end, that he " owed 

 to the voyage the real training or education of his mind;" 

 which training and education, further, bekanntlich, con- 

 cerned alone " geology and the host of living beings." 



On what Mr. Darwin laments as his " curious loss of 

 the higher esthetic tastes," as, for example, that, " now for 

 many years," as he says, " I cannot endure to read a line 

 of poetry I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and 

 found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me," one 

 really in the circumstances cannot find it in one's heart 

 to wonder much. It is a common experience that when 

 some certain one pursuit is made the leading and absorb- 

 ing one, all else fades around it into indifference ; and as 

 it was confessedly no natural taste, but only the good- 

 will of right action, that led him to music, pictures, 

 and literature, one is not surprised to find Mr. Darwin's 

 function and faculty narrowing themselves into that one 

 theory which alone occupies him. There is no relative 

 atrophy of the brain, as (p. 101) he supposes, and his 

 intellect is not dwarfed ; it only asserts itself finally, all 

 else being concurrent thereto, in the single strain which 

 nature in the beginning gave it. What the Beagle obser- 

 vation did for the scientist, and what the Beagle inter- 

 course did for the man, lived in him, and manifested 

 itself in his regard to the last. What only is to be 

 lamented is the limitation and circumscription into which 

 that which he was specially made for the whole interest 

 of natural history unavoidably fell. That and the con- 

 sequent corollaries : those weak reflections philosophically 

 in regard to design ; and those still weaker, as of the 

 commonest man of the day, in regard to positive religion. 

 I think it may be assumed now that we fairly see and 

 understand Mr. Darwin : with his whole soul bent on the 



