January 2, 1888.] 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



67 



house. His talk was very racy and interesting, just like his 

 writings, but he sometimes went on too long on the same subject. 

 I remeoiber a funny dinner at my brother's, where, amongst a few 

 others, were Cabbage and Lyell, both of whom liked to talk. Cir- 

 lyle, however, silenced everyone by haranguing during the whole 

 dinner on the advantages of silence. After dinner Baohage, in liis 

 grimmest manner, thanked Carlyle for his very interesting lecture 

 on !-ilence. 



Carlyle sneered at almost everyone: one day in my house he 

 called Grote's '• History " a "fetid quagmire, with nothing spiritual 

 about it." I alwa3-s thought, until his " Reminiscences " appeared, 

 that his sneers were partlj- jokes, but this now seems rather doubt- 

 ful. His expression was thit of a depressed, almost despondent, 

 yet benevolent, mnn ; and it is notorious how heartily he laughed. 

 I believe that his benevolence was real, though stamed by not a 

 little jealousy. No one can doubt about his extraordinary power of 

 drawing pictures of things and men — far more vivid, as it appears to 

 me, than any drawn by Macaulay. Whether liis pictures of men 

 were true ones is another question. 



He has been all-powerful in impressing some grand moral truths 

 on the minds of men. On the other hand, liis views about slavery 

 were revolting. In his eyes might was right. His mind seemed to 

 me a very narrow one ; even if all branches of science, which he 

 despised, are excluded. It is astonishing to me that Kingsley 

 should hive spoken of him as a man well fitted to advance science. 

 He laughed to scorn the idea that a mathematician, such as 

 Whewell, could judge, as I maintained he could, of Goethe's views 

 on light. He thought it a most ridiculous thing that anyone should 

 care whether a glacier moved a little quicker or a little slower, or 

 moved at all. As far as I could judge, I never met a man with a 

 mind so ill-adapted for scientific research. 



In the aiitumn of 1842, two year.s and eight montlis after 

 his marriage with his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood, 

 Darwin removed from London, the air and social demands 

 of which were alike tinsuited to his health, and finally fixed 

 upon a house in the secluded village of Down, near 

 Beckenham, where he spent the rest of his days. Hence- 

 forth the life of Darwin is merged in the books in which, 

 from time to time, he gave the result of his long years of 

 patient observation and inquiry, from the epoch-making 

 '■Origin" to the monograph on earthworms. With liad 

 health, apparently due to gouty tendencies aggravated by 

 chronic sea-sickness during his voyage ; with nights that 

 never gave unbroken sleep, and days that were never pa.'sed 

 without prostrating pain, he might well have felt justified in 

 doing nothing whatever. But he was saved from the 

 accursed monotony of a wealthy invalid's life by his in- 

 satiate delight in searching for that solution of the problem 

 of the mutability of species which time would not fail to 

 bring. In this, he tells us, he forgot his " daily discomfort," 

 and thus was delivered from morbid introspection. 



Before dealing with the circumstances which hastened 

 the publication of the " Origin of iSpecies," and with the 

 influence of that book on belief in the supernatural, we may 

 biit'fly describe some aspects of the man himself, as presented 

 in Mr. Francis Darwin's chapter on the family life at Down. 



The dome-like forehead with thick bushy eyebrows, the 

 Socrates-like features, the figure wrapped in loose cloak, witli 

 broad-brimmed felt hat in hand, are familiar to us through 

 photographs. But these do not tell us that he was six feet in 

 height, of stooping posture, with eyes bluish-grey, and 

 ruddy complexion which gave no sign of the dLscomfort from 

 which he was never wholly free. His laugh had an honest 

 and sounding ring, he ovei flowed with geniality that no 

 p lin could nnsweeten, he was a devoted father —the touch- 

 ing record of the little maiden whom he lo>t, and on whose 

 tomb he inscribed the simple words, '■ A dear, good child," 

 evidence the tenderness of the man- he was fond of animals, 

 courteous even to the more inferior species, known as boi-es; 

 careful in money matters, extending this to the small con- 

 cerns of the villageFriendly Club; he betrayed an anxiety, 

 strange in a man of his wealth, about leaving his children a 

 competency ; there was a curious side of penui ionsness in 

 his economy of paper, from the b.icks of old MSS. to the 



fragments of .spills. He took snuff when he worked, and 

 smoked when he rested, glad, after the more serious tasks 

 and correspondence of the day were over, to listen to novels, 

 for which he had a great love so long as they ended happily 

 and contained " some person whom one can thoroughly 

 love, if a pretty woman, so much the better." Strangely 

 enough, he lost all pleasure in music, art, and poetry after 

 thirty. When at school he enjoyed Thomson, Byron, and 

 Scott ; Shelley gave him inten.se delight, and he was fond of 

 Shakespeare, especially the historical plays ; but in his old 

 age he found him "so intolerably dull that it nauseated me." 



This curious and lamentable loss of the higher a>sthetic tastes is 

 all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (inde- 

 pendently of any scientiiic facts which they may contain), and 

 essays on all sorts of subjects, interest me as much as ever they did. 

 My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding 

 general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should 

 have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone on which 

 the higher tastes depend I cannot conceive. A man with a mind 

 more highly organised or better constituted than mine would not, 

 I suppose, have thus suffered ; and, if I had to live my lite again, 

 1 would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some 

 music at least once every week, for perhaps ilie jMrts of my brain 

 now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The 

 loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be 

 injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, 

 by enfeebling the emotional part of oui- nature. 



TRICK WITH PAPER RINGS. 



rHE annexed engraving from La JVature shows the 

 method of preparing paper rings for the performance 

 a curious experiment. Take three strips of p.aper, 

 2 inches in width by from 2 to 5 feet in length, and with 



of 



' / 



V 



JJ 



I %•» 



one of them form a ling, ;i.s shown in fig. 1, by pasting 

 the two ends together. Before pasting the ends of the 



