DARWIN'S WANDER-YEARS 45 



beautiful objects as who should imagine that a great 

 painter appreciates the sunset less than a silly boy or 

 a sentimental schoolgirl. As a matter of fact, the 

 naturalist knows and admires a thousand exquisite 

 points of detail in every flower and every insect which 

 only he himself and the true artist can equally delight 

 in. And a keen intellectual and aesthetic joy in the 

 glorious fecundity and loveliness of nature was every- 

 where present to Darwin's mind. But, beyond and 

 above even that, there was also the architectonic delight 

 of the great organiser in the presence of a noble organised 

 product : the peculiar pleasure felt only by the man in 

 whose broader soul all minor details fall at once into 

 their proper place, as component elements in one great 

 consistent and harmonious whole a sympathetic plea- 

 sure akin to that with which an architect views the 

 interior of Ely and of Lincoln, or a musician listens to 

 the linked harmonies of the ' Messiah ' and the ' Crea- 

 tion.' The scheme of nature was now unfolding itself 

 visibly and clearly before Charles Darwin's very eyes. / 

 After eighteen memorable days spent with unceasing 

 delight at Bahia, the ' Beagle ' sailed again for Rio, where 

 Darwin stopped for three months, to improve his ac- 

 quaintance with the extraordinary wealth of the South 

 American fauna and flora. Collecting insects was here 

 his chief occupation, and it is interesting to note even 

 at this early period how his attention was attracted by 

 some of those strange alluring devices on the part of 

 the males for charming their partners which afterwards 

 formed the principal basis for his admirable theory of 

 sexual selection, so fully developed in the ' Descent of 

 Man.' ' Several times,' he says, c when a pair [of 



