2 6 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 



difficult, for life is nearly over with me. I have taken no 

 pains about my style of writing. 



I was born at Shrewsbury on February i2th, 1809, and 

 my earliest recollection goes back only to when I was a few 

 months over four years old, when we went to near Abergele 

 for sea-bathing, and I recollect some events and places there 

 with some little distinctness. 



My mother died in July 1817, when I was a little over 

 eight years old, and it is odd that I can remember hardly 

 anything about her except her death-bed, her black velvet 

 gown, and her curiously constructed work-table. In the 

 spring of this same year I was sent to a day-school in Shrews- 

 bury, where I stayed a year. I have been told that I was 

 much slower in learning than my younger sister Catherine, 

 and I believe that I was in many ways a naughty boy. 



By the time I went to this day-school * my taste for natu- 

 ral history, and more especially for collecting, was well devel- 

 oped. I tried to make out the names of plants,! and col- 

 lected all sorts of things, shells, seals, franks, coins, and min- 

 erals. The passion for collecting which leads a man to be a 

 systematic naturalist, a virtuoso, or a miser, was very strong 

 in me, and was clearly innate, as none of my sisters or brother 

 ever had this taste. 



* Kept by Rev. G. Case, minister of the Unitarian Chapel in the High 

 Street. Mrs. Darwin was a Unitarian and attended Mr. Case's chapel, and 

 my father as a little boy went there with his elder sisters. But both he 

 and his brother were christened and intended to belong to the Church of 

 England ; and after his early boyhood he seems usually to have gone to 

 church and not to Mr. Case's. It appears (St. James 1 Gazette, Dec. 15, 

 1883) that a mural tablet has been erected to his memory in the chapel, 

 which is now known as the ' Free Christian Church.' 



f Rev. W. A. Leighton, who was a schoolfellow of my father's at Mr. 

 Case's school, remembers his bringing a flower to school and saying that 

 his mother had taught him how by looking at the inside of the blossom the 

 name of the plant could be discovered. Mr. Leighton goes on, " This 

 greatly roused my attention and curiosity, and I inquired of him repeated- 

 ly how this could be done ? " but his lesson was naturally enough not 

 transmissible. F. D. 



