RETROSPECT OF A SCIENTIFIC TRAVELLER. 31 



supreme longing that I could live them all over again." 



The foregoing represent the feelings and opinions 

 of well-known hunters and travellers, but if we now 

 quote the impressions of a differently constituted mind, 

 we find the philosopher and man of science not one 

 whit less susceptible than other men to the solemn 

 grandeur of the wilderness, and in the midst of a life 

 devoted to laborious study, he pauses to add his tribute 

 of admiration: 



Mr. Charles Robert Darwin (Philosopher, Naturalist, 

 etc., etc.) 



" It has been said that the love of the chase is an inherent 

 delight in man, a relic of an instinctive passion. If so, I 

 am sure the pleasure of living in the open air, with the sky 

 for a roof, and the ground for a table, is part of the same 

 feeling: it is the savage returning to his wild and native habits. 

 I always look back to our boat journeys, and my land jour- 

 neys, when through unfrequented countries, with an extreme 

 delight, which no scenes of civilization could have created. 

 I do not doubt that every traveller must remember the glowing 

 sense of happiness which he experienced when he first breathed 

 in a foreign clime, where the civilized man had seldom or 

 never trod." f "It is impossible (says a biographical sketch 

 of him) to overrate the influence of the voyages (in H. M. S. 

 Beagle) on Darwin's career. He left England untried and 

 almost uneducated for science. He returned a successful 

 collector, a practised and brilliant geologist, and with a wide 

 knowledge of zoology and above all, he came back full 

 of the thoughts on evolution, etc." 



* Tent Life in Tiger Land, Twelve Years' Reminiscences by the 

 Hon. James Inglis, 1889. 



j" Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of 

 the Countries Visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. Leagle Round 

 the World (1831 to 1836), by Charles Darwin, Edit, of 1879, p. 505. 



Dictionary of National Biography, Edited by Leslie Stephen, 

 Vol. xiv, p. 74. 



