DARWIN'S WANDER-YEARS 43 



partly the hereditary tendencies of Josiah Wedgwood 

 towards minute investigation and accuracy of detail, 

 partly the influence of the scientific time-wave, and the 

 careful training under Professor Henslow? Erasmus 

 Darwin comes before us rather as the brilliant and 

 ingenious amateur, his grandson Charles as the in- 

 structed and fully equipped final product of the scientific 

 schools. 



At St. Paul's Rocks, once more, a mass of new 

 volcanic peaks rising abruptly from the midst of the 

 Atlantic, the naturalist of the ' Beagle ' notes with 

 interest that feather and dirt-feeding and parasitic 

 insects or spiders are the first inhabitants to take up 

 their quarters on recently formed oceanic islands. This 

 problem of the peopling of new lands, indeed, so closely 

 connected with the evolution of new species, necessarily 

 obtruded itself upon his attention again and again 

 during his five years' cruise ; and in some cases, espe- 

 cially that of the Galapagos Islands, the curious insular 

 faunas and floras which he observed upon this trip, 

 composed as they were of mere casual straylings from 

 adjacent shores, produced upon his mind a very deep 

 and lasting impression, whose traces one may without 

 difficulty discern on every second page of the ' Origin 

 of Species.' 



On the last day of February, 1832, the 'Beagle' 

 came to anchor in the harbour of Bahia, and young 

 Darwin caught sight for the first time of the mutually 

 strangling luxuriance of tropical vegetation. Nowhere 

 on earth are the finest conditions of tropical life more 

 fully realised than in the tangled depths of the great 

 uncleared Brazilian forests, which everywhere gird round 



