EARLY DAYS 35 



minerals, coins, nay, since postage stamps were then not 

 yet invented, even franks. But at Edinburgh he gave the 

 earliest distinct evidence of his definite scientific tastes 

 by contributing to the local academic society a paper on 

 the floating eggs of the common sea-mat, in which he 

 had even then succeeded in discovering for the first 

 time organs of locomotion. Thence he proceeded 

 to Christ's College, Cambridge. The Darwins were 

 luckily a Cambridge family : luckily, let us say, for had 

 it been otherwise had young Darwin been distorted 

 from his native bent by Plato and Aristotle, and plunged 

 deep into the mysteries of Barbara and Celarent, as would 

 infallibly have happened to him at the sister university 

 who can tell how long we might have had to wait in 

 vain for the c Origin of Species ' and the ' Descent of 

 Man ' ? But Cambridge, which rejoiced already in the 

 glory of Newton, was now to match it by the glory of 

 Darwin. In its academical course, the mathematical 

 wedge had always kept open a dim passage for physical 

 science ; and at the exact moment when Darwin was an 

 undergraduate at Christ's from 1827 to 1831 the 

 university had the advantage of several good scientific 

 teachers, and amongst them one, Professor Henslow, a 

 well-known botanist, who took a special interest in 

 young Darwin's intellectual development. There, too, 

 he met with Sedgwick, Airy, Eamsay, and numerous 

 other men of science, whose intercourse with him must 

 no doubt have contributed largely to mould and form 

 the future cast of his peculiar philosophical idiosyn- 

 crasy. 



It was to Henslow's influence that Darwin in later 

 years attributed in great part his powerful taste for 



