32 CHARLES DARWIN 



a cultivated scientific family, surrounded from his birth 

 by elevating influences, and secured beforehand from the 

 cramping necessity of earning his own livelihood by his 

 own exertions, the boy was destined to grow up to full 

 maturity in the twenty-one years of slow development 

 that immediately preceded the passing of the first Eeform 

 Act. The thunder of the great European upheaval had 

 grown silent at Waterloo when he was barely six years 

 old, and his boyhood was passed amid country sights 

 and sounds during that long period of reconstruction 

 and assimilation which followed the fierce volcanic 

 outburst of the French Revolution. Happy in the 

 opportunity of his birth, he came upon the world eight 

 years after the first publication of Lamarck's remarkable 

 speculations, and for the first twenty-two years of his 

 life he was actually the far younger contemporary of the 

 great French evolutionary philosopher. Eleven years 

 before his arrival upon the scene Malthus had set forth 

 his 'Principle of Population.' Charles Darwin thus 

 entered upon a stage well prepared for him, and he 

 entered it with an idiosyncrasy exactly adapted for 

 making the best of the situation. The soil had been 

 thoroughly turned and dressed beforehand: Charles 

 Darwin's seed had only to fall upon it in order to spring 

 up and bear fruit a hundredfold, in every field of science 

 or speculation. 



For it was not biology alone that he was foredoomed 

 to revolutionise, but the whole range of human thought, 

 and perhaps even ultimately of human action. 



la it mere national prejudice which makes one add 

 with congratulatory pleasure that Darwin was born in 

 England, rather than in France, in Germany, or in 



