CHARLES DARWIN AND HIS ANTECEDENTS 29 



the famous unglazed black porcelain. Those were the 

 darkest days of industrial art and decorative handicraft 

 in modern England. Josiah Wedgwood, by his marked 

 originality and force of character, succeeded in turning 

 the current of national taste, and creating among us a 

 new and distinctly higher type of artistic workman- 

 ship. His activity, however, was not confined to his 

 art alone, but found itself a hundred other different 

 outlets in the most varied directions. When his pot- 

 teries needed enlargement to meet the increased 

 demand, he founded for the hands employed upon his 

 works the model industrial village of Etruria. When 

 Brindley began cutting artificial waterways across the 

 broad face of central England, it was in the great potter 

 that he found his chief ally in promoting the construc- 

 tion of the Grand Trunk Canal. Wedgwood, indeed, 

 was a builder of schools and a maker of roads ; a 

 chemist and an artist ; a friend of Watt and an employer 

 of Flaxman. In short, like Erasmus Darwin, he pos- 

 sessed that prime essential in the character of genius, 

 an immense underlying stock of energy. And with it 

 there went its best concomitant, the ' infinite capacity 

 for taking pains.' Is it not probable that in their joint 

 descendant, the brilliant but discursive and hazardous 

 genius of Erasmus Darwin was balanced and regulated 

 by soberer qualities inherited directly from the profound 

 industry of the painstaking potter ? When later on 

 we find Charles Darwin spending hours in noting the 

 successive movements of the tendrils in a plant, or 

 watching for long years the habits and manners of 

 earthworms in flower-pots, may we not reasonably con- 

 jecture that he derived no little share of his extraordi- 



