DARWIN'S WANDER-YEARS 41 



minable delights to the soul of the enthusiastic young 

 collector; the South American pampas, with their 

 colossal remains of extinct animals, huge geological 

 precursors of the stunted modern sloths and armadillos 

 that still inhabit the self-same plains ; Tierra del 

 Fuego, with its almost Arctic climate, and its glimpses 

 into the secrets of the most degraded savage types; 

 the vast range of the Andes and the Cordilleras, 

 with their volcanic energy and their closely crowded 

 horizontal belts of climatic life ; the South Sea Islands, 

 those paradises of the Pacific, Hesperian fables true, 

 alike for the lover of the picturesque and the biological 

 student ; Australia, that surviving fragment of an ex- 

 tinct world, with an antiquated fauna - whose archaic 

 character still closely recalls the European life of ten 

 million years back in the secondary epoch : all these 

 and many others equally novel and equally instructive 

 passed in long alternating panorama before Darwin's 

 eyes, and left their images deeply photographed for 

 ever after on the lasting tablets of his retentive memory. 

 That was the real great university in which he studied 

 nature and read for his degree. Our evolutionist was 

 now being educated. 



Throughout the whole of the journal of this long 

 cruise, which Darwin afterwards published in an en- 

 larged form, it is impossible not to be struck at 

 every turn with the way in which his inquisitive 

 mind again and again recurs to the prime elements of 

 those great problems towards whose solution he after- 

 wards so successfully pointed out the path. The Dar- 

 winian ideas are all already there in the germ ; the 

 embryo form of the ' Origin of Species ' plays in and 

 5 



