DARWIN. 19 



beyond. Mr. Woodall states that one of Darwin's school- 

 fellows, the Rev. W. A. Leighton, remembers him pluck- 

 ing a plant and recalling one of his mother's elementary 

 lessons in botany. Too soon however the mother was 

 taken from The Mount; she died in July, 1817, when 

 Charles was between eight and nine years old. 



The eldest son of Dr. Robert Darwin, on whom the 

 grandfather's name of Erasmus had been bestowed, is 

 notable as the intimate friend of the Carlyles. "He had 

 something of original and sarcastically ingenious in him," 

 says Carlyle, in his " Reminiscences," " one of the sin- 

 cerest, naturally truest, and most modest of men. . . . E. 

 Darwin it was who named the late Whewell, seeing him 

 sit, all ear (not all assent), at some of my lectures, ' The 

 Harmonious Blacksmith.' My dear one had a great 

 favour for this honest Darwin always ; many a road to 

 shops, and the like, he drove her in his cab, in those 

 early days when even the charge of omnibuses was a 

 consideration, and his sparse utterances, sardonic often, 

 were a great amusement to her. ' A perfect gentleman,' 

 she at once discerned him to be, and of sound worth and 

 kindliness, in the most unaffected form." He died in 

 1881, aged 77, leaving no memorial to the public of his 

 undoubtedly great abilities. Like his younger brother, 

 he was a member of Christ's College, Cambridge, where 

 he graduated M.B., in 1828. 



Early in 1817, the closing year of his mother's life, 

 Charles Darwin was placed at school with the Rev. 

 George Case, minister of the Shrewsbury Unitarian 

 church, to which the Darwins were attached, in this 

 resembling the Wedgwoods. At midsummer, 1818, how- 



