PART iv MODERN E VOL UTION 1 1 7 



thence to Edinburgh and Cambridge Universities ; 

 was occupied as volunteer naturalist on board the 

 Beagle from December 1831 till October 1836 ; that 

 he published his epoch-making Origin of Species in 

 November 1859; and that he was buried by the side 

 of Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey on the 

 26th April 1882. 



As with not a few other men of ' light and 

 leading/ neither school nor university did much for 

 him, nor did his boyhood give indication of future 

 greatness. In his answers to the series of questions 

 addressed to various scientific men in 1873 by his 

 distinguished cousin, Francis Galton, he says : * I 

 consider that all I have learnt of any value has been 

 self-taught/ and he adds that his education fostered 

 no methods of observation or reasoning. Of the 

 Shrewsbury Grammar School, where, after the death 

 of his mother (daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the 

 celebrated potter), in his ninth year, he was placed 

 as a boarder till his sixteenth year, he tells us, in the 

 modest and candid 'Autobiography' printed in the 

 Life and Letters^ ' nothing could have been worse for 

 the development of my mind.' All that he was 

 taught were the classics, and a little ancient geo- 

 graphy and history ; no mathematics, and no modern 

 languages. Happily, he had inherited a taste for 

 natural history and for collecting, his spoils including 

 not only shells and plants, but also coins and seals. 

 When the fact that he helped his brother in chemical 

 experiments became known to Dr. Butler, the head- 

 master, that desiccated pedagogue publicly rebuked 

 him * for wasting time on such useless subjects.' 

 Then his father, angry at finding that he was doing 



