CHARLES DARWIN AND HIS ANTECEDENTS 27 



learned monograph on the fossil barnacles. During 

 all those years, in fact, he had really done little else 

 than collect material for the work of his lifetime. If 

 we judge men by outward performance only, we may 

 often be greatly mistaken in our estimates : poten- 

 tiality is wider than actuality; what a man does is 

 never a certain or extreme criterion of what he can 

 do. 



The Darwins, indeed, were all a mighty folk, of 

 varied powers and varied attainments. Erasmus's 

 brother, Robert, was the author of a work on botany, 

 which long enjoyed a respectable repute. Of his sons, 

 one, Sir Francis Darwin, was noted as a keen observer 

 of animals ; a second, Charles, who died at twenty-one, 

 was already the author of a very valuable medical 

 essay ; while the third, Robert, was the Shrewsbury 

 F.R.S., the father of our great evolutionary thinker. 

 And among Charles Darwin's own cousins, one is Mr. 

 Hensleigh Wedgwood, the philologist ; a second was the 

 late Sir Henry Holland ; and a third is .Mr. Francis 

 Galton, the author of that essentially Darwinian book, 

 ' Hereditary Genius.' 



Robert Waring Darwin took to himself a wife from 

 another very great and eminent family. He married 

 Susannah Wedgwood, daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, 

 the famous potter ; and from these two silent repre- 

 sentatives of powerful stocks, Charles Robert Darwin, 

 the father of modern evolutionary biology, was born at 

 Shrewsbury, on February the 12th, 1809. That Wedg- 

 wood connection, again, is no mere casual or unimportant 

 incident in the previous life-history of the Darwinian 

 originality ; it throws a separate clear light of its own 



