28 CHARLES DARWIN 



upon the peculiar and admirably compounded idiosyn- 

 crasy of Charles Darwin. 



A man, indeed, owes on the average quite as much 

 to his mother's as to his father's family. It is a mere 

 unscientific old-world prejudice which makes us for 

 the most part count ancestry in the direct ascending 

 male line alone, to the complete neglect of the equally 

 important maternal pedigree. From the biological 

 point of view, at least, every individual is a highly com- 

 plex compound of hereditary elements, a resultant of 

 numerous converging forces, a meeting place of two 

 great streams of inheritance, each of which is itself 

 similarly made up by the like confluence of innumerable 

 distinct prior tributaries. Between these two it is 

 almost impossible for us accurately to distribute any 

 given individuality. How much Charles Darwin owed 

 to the Darwins, and how much he owed in turn to the 

 Wedgwoods, no man is yet psychologist enough or phy- 

 siologist enough to say. But that he owed a great deal 

 to either strong and vigorous strain we may even now 

 quite safely take for granted. 



The Wedgwood family were ' throwers ' by handi- 

 craft, superior artisans long settled at Burslem, in the 

 Staffordshire potteries. Josiah, the youngest of thirteen 

 children, lamed by illness in early life, was turned by 

 this happy accident from his primitive task as a 

 * thrower ' to the more artistic and original work of pro- 

 ducing ornamental coloured earthenware. Skilful and 

 indefatigable, of indomitable energy and with great 

 powers of forcing his way in life against all obstacles, 

 young Wedgwood rose rapidly by his own unaided 

 exertions to be a master potter, and a manufacturer of 



