DARWIN. 



231 



thoughts of these elder and younger evolutionists of 

 the same family ran in parallel lines. They seemed 

 to have inborn tendencies to look at Nature in the 

 same way. 



Another cause of Darwin's success where all 

 others had failed was his life at a time when the 

 storehouse of facts was fairly bursting for want of a 

 generalization; the progress in every branch since 

 Lamarck's time had been prodigious. Again, even 

 this combination of temperament and circumstance 

 might have failed but for Darwin's rare education 

 from Nature upon the voyage of the Beagle. He 

 had gained little or nothing from the routine 

 methods of education in school and university, 

 as we learn in his own words : " My scientific tastes 

 appear to have been certainly innate. ... I con- 

 sider that all I have learnt of any value has been 

 self-taught. . . . My innate taste for natural his- 

 tory strongly confirmed and directed by the voyage 

 of the Beagle? Humboldt's Personal Narrative, 

 and Herschel's Introduction to the Study of Natural 

 Philosophy aroused his enthusiasm. His natural 

 taste for Geology, chilled by earlier teachers, was 

 revived during an excursion with Professor Sedg- 

 wick, from whom he learned " that science consists 

 in grouping facts so that general laws and conclu- 

 sions may be drawn from them." This was in 

 1831 ; and upon his return he entered upon his 

 ' Voyage.' 



His training for such an undertaking had 



