1 68 CAMBRIDGE. ,ETAT. IQ-22. 



His old college friends agree in speaking with affectionate 

 warmth of his pleasant, genial temper as a young man. From 

 what they have been able to tell me, I gain the impression of 

 a young man overflowing with animal spirits leading a varied 

 healthy life not over-industrious in the set studies of the 

 place, but full of other pursuits, which were followed with 

 a rejoicing enthusiasm. Entomology, riding, shooting in 

 the fens, suppers and card-playing, music at King's Chapel, 

 engravings at the Fitzwilliam Museum, walks with Professor 

 Henslow all combined to fill up a happy life. He seems to 

 have infected others with his enthusiasm. Mr. Herbert relates 

 how, during the same Barmouth summer, he was pressed into 

 the service of " the science " as my father called collecting 

 beetles. They took their daily walks together among the 

 hills behind Barmouth, or boated in the Mawddach estuary, 

 or sailed to Sarn Badrig to land there at low water, or went 

 fly-fishing in the Cors-y-gedol lakes. " On these occasions 

 Darwin entomologised most industriously, picking up creatures 

 as he walked along, and bagging everything which seemed 

 worthy of being pursued, or of further examination. And 

 very soon he armed me with a bottle of alcohol, in which 

 I had to drop any beetle which struck me as not of a common 

 kind. I performed this duty with some diligence in my 

 constitutional walks ; but alas ! my powers of discrimination 

 seldom enabled me to secure a prize the usual result, on his 

 examining the contents of my bottle, being an exclamation, 

 * Well, old Cherbury ' * (the nickname he gave me, and by 

 which he usually addressed me), ' none of these will do.' " 

 Again, the Rev. T. Butler, who was one of the Barmouth 

 reading-party in 1828, says : "He inoculated me with a taste 

 for Botany which has stuck by me all my life." 



Archdeacon Watkins, another old college friend of my 

 father's, remembers him unearthing beetles in the willows 

 * No doubt in allusion to the title of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, 



