DARWIN'S BIOGRAPHY. 43] 



I. APPRENTICESHIP. We are struck with 

 the difficulty which Darwin had in finding his 

 true bent, in discovering what he had to do in 

 the world. If we look into his immediate an- 

 cestral inheritance, we observe a line of 

 science coming down to him through his fore- 

 fathers. He has celebrated the mental capac- 

 ity of his father, who was a physician and 

 specially gifted with keen power of observa- 

 tion, which the son also shows. But the most 

 interesting as well as famous of these ancest- 

 ors was Dr. Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) who 

 was a poet and put Nature into brilliant Po- 

 pian verse in his Botanic Garden, and seems 

 to have kept up his poetizing to the end of 

 his days. This trait he did not transmit to 

 his grandson, who says (in his Autobiogra- 

 phy) that in earlier life he read poetry with 

 pleasure, and then continues: "But now for 

 many years I cannot endure to read a line of 

 poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakes- 

 peare, and I found it so intolerably dull that 

 it nauseated me. I have also lost my taste 

 for pictures and music. My mind seems to 

 have become a kind of machine for grin ding- 

 general laws out of large collections of facts." 

 So he confesses to "the atrophy of the higher 

 aesthetic tastes" during his later years. Very 

 .different in this regard was his grandfather, 

 who, however, on another line reveals a men- 



