DAR WINS' WANDER-YEARS 39 



salary, and partly paid his own expenses on condition 

 of being permitted to retain in his own possession the 

 animals and plants he collected on the journey. The 

 * Beagle ' set sail from Devonport on December the 27th, 

 1831; she returned to Falmouth on October the 2nd, 

 1836. 



That long five years' cruise around the world, the 

 journal of which Darwin has left us in the * Voyage of 

 the " Beagle," ' proved a marvellous epoch in the great 

 naturalist's quiet career. It left its abiding mark 

 deeply imprinted on all his subsequent life and thinking. 

 Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin were cabinet biologists, - 

 who had never beheld with their own eyes the great 

 round world and all that therein is ; Charles Darwin 

 had the inestimable privilege of seeing for himself, at 

 first hand, a large part of the entire globe and of the 

 creatures that inhabit it. Even to have caught one 

 passing glimpse of the teeming life of the tropics is in 

 itself an education ; to the naturalist it is more, it is a 

 revelation. Our starved little northern fauna and flora, 

 the mere leavings of the vast ice sheets that spread 

 across our zone in the glacial epoch, show us a world 

 depopulated of all its largest, strangest, and fiercest 

 creatures ; a world dwarfed in all its component elements, 

 and immensely differing in ten thousand ways from 

 that rich, luxuriant, over-stocked hot-house in which 

 the first great problems of evolution were practically 

 worked out by survival of the fittest. But the tropics 

 preserve for us still in all their jungles something of the 

 tangled, thickly-peopled aspect which our planet must 

 have presented for countless ages in all latitudes before 

 the advent of primaeval man. We now know that 



