6 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. [Ch. II. 



curiously constructed work-table. In the spring of this same 

 year I was sent to a day-school in Shrewsbury, where I stayed 

 a year. I have been told that I was much slower in learning 

 than my younger sister Catherine, and 1^ believe that I was in 

 many ways a naughty boy. 



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

 history, and more especially for collecting, was well developed. 

 I tried to make out the names of plants, and collected all 

 sorts of things, shells, seals, franks, coins, and minerals. 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. 



One little event during this year has fixed itself very firmly 

 in my mind, and I hope that it has done so from my conscience 

 having been afterwards sorely troubled by it ; it is curious as 

 showing that apparently I was interested at this early age in 

 the variability of plants ! I told another little boy (I believe 

 it was Leighton,f who afterwards became a well-known lichen- 

 ologist and botanist), that I could produce variously coloured 

 polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with certain 

 coloured fluids, which was of course a monstrous fable, and had 

 never been tried by me. I may here also confess that as a 

 little boy I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, 

 and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement. For 

 instance, I once gathered much valuable fruit from my father's 

 trees and hid it in the shrubbery, and then ran in breathless 

 haste to spread the news that I had discovered a hoard of 

 stolen fruit.J 



I must have been a very simple little fellow when I first 

 went to the school. A boy of the name of Garnett took me 



* Kept by Rev. Q. 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's Gazette, 

 December 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. D. 



t Rev. W. A. Leighton 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 repeatedly how this could be done?" — but his lesson was 

 naturally enough not transmissible. — F. D. 



\ His father wisely treated this tendency not by makiDg crimes of the 

 fibs, but by making light of the discoveries. — F. D. 



