$6 CHARLES DARWIN 



natural history. But in truth the ascription of such 

 high praise to his early teacher smacks too much of the 

 Darwinian modesty to be accepted at once without 

 demur by the candid critic. The naturalist, like the 

 poet, is born, not made. How much more, then, must 

 this needs be the case with the grandson of Erasmus 

 Darwin and of Josiah Wedgwood ? As a matter of fact, 

 already at Edinburgh the lad had loved to spend his 

 days among the sea-beasts and wrack of the Inches in 

 the Firth of Forth ; and it was through the instrument- 

 ality of his * brother entomologists ' that he first became 

 acquainted with Henslow himself when he removed to 

 Cambridge. The good professor could not make him 

 into a naturalist : inherited tendencies and native ener- 

 gies had done that for him already from his very cradle. 

 ' Doctrina sed vim promovet insitam ; ' and it was 

 well that Darwin took up at Cambridge with the study 

 of geology as his first love. For geology was then the 

 living and moving science, as astronomy had been in 

 the sixteenth century, and as biology is at the present 

 day the growing-point, so to speak, of European de- 

 velopment, whence all great things might naturally be 

 expected. Moreover, it was and is the central science 

 of the concrete class, having relations with astronomy 

 on the one hand, and with biology on the other ; con- 

 cerned alike with cosmical chances or changes on this 

 side, and with the minutest facts of organic nature on 

 that; the meeting-place and border-] and of all the sepa- 

 rate branches of study that finally bear upon the com- 

 plex problems of our human life. No other subject of 

 investigation was so well calculated to rouse Darwin's 

 interest in the ultimate questions of evolution or creation, 



