64 CHARLES DARWIN 



ment of a regular genealogical theory of life in its 

 entirety. 



Though we are here concerned mainly with Charles 

 Darwin the thinker and writer not with Charles Darwin 

 the husband and father a few words of explanation as 

 to his private life must necessarily be added at the 

 present point, before we pass on to consider the long, 

 slow, and cautious brewing of that wonderful work, the 

 * Origin of Species.' Darwin returned home from the 

 voyage of the ' Beagle ' at the end of the year 1836. 

 Soon after, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, 

 no doubt through the influence of his friend Lyell, who 

 was quite enthusiastic over his splendid geological 

 investigations on the rate of elevation in the Pampas 

 and the Cordillera. Acting on Lyell's advice, too, he 

 determined to seek no official appointment, but to 

 devote himself entirely for the rest of his life to the 

 pursuit of science. In 1838, at the age of twenty-nine, 

 he read before the Geological Society his paper on the 

 ' Connection of Volcanic Phenomena with the Elevation 

 of Mountain Chains,' when, says Lyell admiringly in a 

 private letter, ' he opened upon De la Beche, Phillips, 

 and others ' the veterans of the science ' his whole 

 battery of the earthquakes and volcanoes of the Andes/ 

 Shortly after, the audacious young man was appointed 

 secretary to the Geological Society, a post which he 

 filled when the voyage of the ' Beagle ' was first pub- 

 lished in 1839. 



In the early part of that same year, the rising 

 naturalist took to himself a wife from one of the 

 houses to which he himself owed no small part of his 

 conspicuous greatness. His choice fell upon his cousin, 



