66 



♦ KNOW^LEDGE ♦ 



[January 2, 1888. 



reproved him for caring for nothing but shooting, dogs, and 

 rat catching, and declared that he would be a disgrace to 

 the family ! He sent him to Edinburgh University with 

 his brother to study medicine, but Darwin found the dulness 

 of the lectures intolerable, and the sight of blood sickened 

 him, as it did his father. Although the effect of the 

 "incredibly" dry lectures on geology made him — the future 

 Secretary of the Geological Society ! — vow never to lead a 

 book on the science, or in any way study it, his interest in 

 biological subjects grew, and its firstfruits were shown in a 

 paper read before the Plinian Society at Edinburgh in 1826, 

 in which he reported his discovery that the so called ova of 

 Flustra, or the sea-mat, were larva?. 



But his father had to accept the fact that Darwin disliked 

 the idea of being a doctor, and fearing that he would 

 degenerate into an idle sporting man, proposed that he 

 should become a clergyman ! Darwin says upon this : — 



I asked for some time to consider, as £rom what little I had heard 

 or thought on the subject I had scruples about declaring luy belief 

 in all the dogmas of the Church of England, though otherwise I 

 liked the thought of being a country clergyraan. Accordingly I 

 read with care " Pearson on the Creed," and a few other books on 

 divinity ; and, as I did not then in the least doubt the strict and 

 liter.al truth of every word in the Bible, I soon persuaded m_vself 

 that our creed must be fully accepted. Considering how fiercely I 

 have been attacked by the orthodox, it seems ludicrous that I once 

 intended to be a clergyman. Nor was this intention and my father's 

 wish ever formally given up, but died a natural death when, on 

 leaving Cambridge, I joined the Beapli' as naturalist. If the phre- 

 nologists are to be trusted, I was well fitted in one respect to be a 

 clertryman. A few years ago the secretaries of a German psycho- 

 logical society asked me earnestly by letter for a photograph of 

 myself ; and some time afterwards I received the proceedings of one 

 of the meetings, in which it seemed that the shape of my head had 

 been the subject of a public discussion, and one of tlie speakers 

 declared that 1 had the bump of reverence developed enough for 

 ten priests. 



The result was that early in 1828 he went to Cambridge, 

 the three years spent at which were " time wasted, as far as 

 the academical studies were concerned." His passion for 

 shooting and hunting led him into a sporting, card-playing, 

 drinking company, but .science was his redemption. No 

 pui-suit gave him so much pleasure as collecting beetles, of 

 liis zeal in which the following is an exami)le : " One day, 

 on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and 

 seized one in each hand : then I saw a third and new kind, 

 which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one which 

 I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas 1 it ejected 

 some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that 

 I was forced to s^iit the beetle out, which was lost, as was 

 the third one." 



Darwin scarcely does his Alma J/reier justice, for, happily 

 for his future career, and therefore for the interests of 

 science,he became intimate with men like Wliewell, Henslow, 

 and Sedgwick, while the reading of Humboldt's " Personal 

 Narrative," and of Sir John Herschel's " Introduction to 

 Natural Philosophy," stirred up in him "a burning zeal to 

 add even the most humble contiibution to the noble struc- 

 ture of Natural Science." The vow to eschew geology was 

 (piickly broken when he came under the spsU of Sedgwick's 

 iallu'^nce, but it was the friendship of Henslow that deter- 

 niiufd his after career, and prevented him from becoming the 

 '• Rev. Charles Darwin." For on his return from a geological 

 toar in Wales with Sedgwick he found a letter from Henslow 

 awaiting him, the purport of which is in the following 

 extract : — 



" I have been asked by Peacock (Lowndean Professor of 

 Astronomy at Cambridge) to recommend him a naturalist as 

 companion to Captain Fitz-Roy, employed by Government 

 to survey the southern extremity of America. I have 

 stated that I consider you to be the best-qualified person I 

 know of who is likely to undertake such a situation." 



In connection with this the following memorandum from 

 Darwin's pocket-book of 1831 is of interest: — "Returned 

 to Shrewsbury at end of August. Refused offer of voyage." 



This refusal was given at the instance of his father, who 

 objected to the scheme as " wild and unsettling, and as dis-, 

 reputable to his character as a clergyman " ; but he soon 

 yielded on the advice of his brother-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood, 

 and on Darwin's plea that he " should be deuced clever to 

 spend more than his allowance whilst on board the Beagle." 

 On this his father answered with a smile. '' But they tell 

 me you are very clever." It is amusing to find that Darwin 

 narrowly escaped being rejected by Fitz-Roy, who, as a 

 disciple of Lavater, doubted whether a man with such a 

 nose as Ditrwin's "could possess sufficient energy and deter- 

 mination for the voyage." 



With the details of that voyage, the one memorable event 

 in Darwin's otherwise nnad venturous life, our readers are 

 surely familiar, for they are set down in delightful narrative 

 in his " Naturalist's Voyage Round the World," and it will 

 suffice to quote a passage from the autobiography bearing 

 on the significance of the materials collected during his five 

 years' absence. 



During the voyage of the Beagle I had been deeply impressed by 

 discovering in the Pampean formation great fossil animals covered 

 with armour like that on the existing armadillos ; secondly, by the 

 manner in which closely allied animals replace one another in 

 proceeding southwards over the continent; and thirdly, by the 

 South American character of most of the productions of the 

 Galapagos Archipelago, and more especially by the manner in which 

 they differ slightly on each island of the group, none of the islands 

 appearing to be very ancient in a geological sense. It was evident 

 that such facts as these, as well as many others, could only be 

 explained on the supposition that species graduall.v became 

 modified ; and the subject haunted me. But it was equally evident 

 that " none of the evolutionary theories then current in the scientific 

 world ' could account for the innumerable cases in which organisms 

 of every kind are beautifully adapted to their habits of life. ... I 

 had always been much struck by such adaptations, and until these 

 could be explained, it seemed to me almost useless to endeavour to 

 prove by indirect evidence that species have been modified. ... In 

 October 1S38, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my 

 systematic in(|uiry, I happened to read for amusement " M.althus on 

 Population," and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for 

 existence which everywhere goes on, from long-continued observa- 

 tions of the habits of plants and animals, it at once struck me that 

 under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be 

 preserved, and unfavourable ones destroyed. The result of this 

 would be the formation of new species. 



Shortly after his return he settled in London, prepared 

 his journal and manuscripts of observations for publication, 

 and opened, he s.ays under date of July 1837, " my first 

 note-book for facts in relation to the origin of species, about 

 which I had long reflected, and never ceased working for 

 the next twenty years." He acted for two years as one of 

 the honorar}' secretaries of the Geological Society, which 

 brought him into close relations with Lyell, and as his 

 health allowed him to go into society he saw a good deal 

 of prominent literary and scientific contemporaries, among 

 these, Herschel, Carlyle, Macaulay, Buckle, and Sydney 

 Smith. His reminiscences of these were evidently vague, 

 of no one of them does he attempt any full-length portrait ; 

 clearly they were not in " touch " with him. He quotes an 

 amusing stor3', which was told by Sydney Smith at Dean 

 Milman's, of the penurious Lady Cork, who was once so 

 much affected by one of the witty Canon's charity sermons 

 that she borrowed a guinea from a friend to put in the plate. 

 He has most to say about the fellow-dyspeptic who empties 

 big buckets of contempt on a theory which he had never 

 the patience to study, and who has only words of superior 

 pity for the poor creatures who wade through the " Origin 

 of Species," of which he says he could never read a line. 



The last man whom I will mention is Carlyle, seen by me several 

 times at my brother's house, and two or three times at my own 



