2o CHARLES DARWIN 



CHAPTER H. 



CHARLES DARWIN AND HIS ANTECEDENTS. 



FROM the environment let us turn to the individual ; 

 from the world in which the man moved to the man who 

 moved in it, and was in time destined to move it. 



Who was he, and whence did he derive his excep- 

 tional energy and intellectual panoply ? 



Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather, the first of the line 

 in whom the distinctive Darwinian strain of intellect 

 overtly displayed itself, was the son of one Robert 

 Darwin, a gentleman of Nottinghamshire, ' a person of 

 curiosity,' with ' a taste for literature and science ; ' so 

 that for four generations at least, in the paternal line, 

 the peculiar talents of the Darwin family had been 

 highly cultivated in either direction. Robert Darwin 

 was an early member of the Spalding Club, a friend of 

 Stukeley the antiquary, and an embryo geologist, after 

 the fantastic, half-superstitious fashion of his own time. 

 Of his four sons, both Robert, the eldest, and Erasmus, 

 the youngest, were authors and botanists. Erasmus 

 himself was a Cambridge man, and his natural bent of 

 mind and energy led him irresistibly on to the study of 

 medicine. Taking his medical degree at his own uni- 

 versity, and afterwards preparing for practice by attend- 



