26 CHARLES DARWIN 



in the case of that intermediate Mendelssohn who was 

 son of Moses Mendelssohn, the philosopher, and father 

 of Felix Bartholdy Mendelssohn, the composer that 

 mere link in a marvellous chain who was wont to 

 observe of himself in the decline of life, that in 

 his youth he was called the son of the great Men- 

 delssohn, and in his old age the father of the great 

 Mendelssohn. As a matter of fact, one may fairly 

 doubt whether such a case of actual skipping is ever 

 possible in the nature of things. In the particular 

 instance of Robert Waring Darwin at least we may be 

 pretty sure that the distinctive Darwinian strain of 

 genius lay merely latent rather than dormant : that it 

 did not display itself to the world at large, but that it 

 persisted silently as powerful as ever within the remote 

 recesses of the thinking organism. Not every man 

 brings out before men all that is within him. Robert 

 "Waring Darwin was a physician at Shrewsbury ; and 

 he attained at least sufficient scientific eminence in his 

 own time to become a Fellow of the Royal Society, in 

 days when that honour was certainly not readily con- 

 ferred upon country doctors of modest reputation. 

 Charles Darwin says of him plainly, ' He was incom- 

 parably the most acute observer whom I ever knew.' 

 It may well have been that Robert Darwin lived and 

 died, as his famous son lived for fifty years of his great 

 life, in comparative silence and learned retirement ; for 

 we must never forget that if Charles Darwin had only 

 completed the first half century of his laborious exist- 

 ence, he would have been remembered merely as the 

 author of an entertaining work on the voyage of the 

 'Beagle,' a plausible theory of coral islands, and a 



