CHARLES DARWIN 127 



herself," and where the Shrewsbury pedagogue, the 

 Edinburgh medicos, and the Cambridge theologians had 

 signally failed. Nature showed him the way by which, 

 to borrow Henslow's prophetic phrase, " anything he 

 pleased might be done." 



And Nature, the old nurse, took The cliild upon her knee, 

 Saying, " Here is a story-book Thy Father has written for thee." 



It is both interesting and amusing to think that these 

 lines were written by Longfellow on Agassiz, an uncom- 

 promising opponent of the Evolution Theory. 



This fourth educational experiment was as successful 

 as the others had been fruitless, and was, as Darwin 

 himself puts it, the starting-point of his " second Ufe." 



The only item connected with the voyage of the Beagle I 

 propose to refer to occurs in an extract from one of his letters 

 written in 1877. " When I was on board the Beagle, I 

 beheved in the permanence of species, but, as far as I can 

 remember, vague doubts occasionally flitted across my 

 mind. On my return home in the autumn of 1837 I in^- 

 mediately began to prepare my journal for publication and 

 then saw how many facts indicated the common descent 

 of species, so that in July 1837, I opened a notebook 

 to record any facts which might bear on the question. 

 But I did not become convinced that species were mutable 

 until, I think, two or three years had elapsed." 



Soon after his return from his travels Darwin came 

 across a famous book called An Essay on the Principles of 

 Population, written by the Rev. Thomas Malthus, a 

 Surrey vicar, who had died whilst Darwin was abroad. 

 The essay was a very pessimistic production aimed at 

 meeting the rhapsodic views of the Rousseau school 

 of thinkers. Malthus argued that organisms if left 

 perfect freedom to breed and given unlimited room in 

 which to multiply would fill any conceivable area in a 

 very short time. The only hmits to their increase were 

 those of space and food. So far as man was concerned, 



