28 Charles Robert Darwin. 



remarkable absence in him of all self-consciousness. . . . 

 His manner to a distinguished person and to the youngest 

 student was exactly the same. ... It always struck me 

 that his mind could not well be touched by any paltry feel- 

 ing of envy, vanity, or jealousy. With all this equability 

 of temper and remarkable benevolence, there was no insip- 

 idity of character. . . . When principle came into play, no 

 power on earth could have turned him a hair's breadth. . . . 

 In intellect, so far as I could judge, accurate powers of ob- 

 servation, sound sense, and cautious judgment seemed pre- 

 dominant. Nothing seemed to give him so much enjoy- 

 ment as drawing conclusions from minute observations. 

 Reflecting upon his character with gratitude and reverence, 

 his moral attributes rise, as they should do in the highest 

 characters, in pre-eminence over his intellect." These sen- 

 tences impress us as if the writer had in some stainless mir- 

 ror perceived the lineaments of his own mind and heart 

 and ascribed them to another. 



We speak of Darwin's as an uneventful life, but it was 

 an event of no small importance for him to meet and for 

 four years be subject to the constant influence of such a 

 man as this. Something of essential kinship there must 

 have been between them, but it may well be doubted wheth- 

 er the likeness in the younger to the older man would have 

 come out so vividly if there had not been this long and 

 close relation. From this first event sprang another of re- 

 markable significance : his sailing in the " Beagle " on a 

 cruise of survey and general observation. This splendid 

 opportunity came to him from Professor Henslow, who was 

 deputed by the captain of the " Beagle " to select a prom- 

 ising young naturalist to accompany him, without salary 

 but without expense. Darwin's father gave his consent re- 

 luctantly, fearing that so novel an experience might unset- 

 tle him for the church, — as verily it did. He sailed in De- 

 cember, 1831, and returned in October, 1836. In the "Voy- 

 age of the Beagle, a Naturalist's Voyage Round the World," 

 he set down only a part, albeit a very large and interesting 

 part, of all his observations. Had he written nothing else 

 but this, it would have ranked him high among the natural- 

 ists of his century. But it is as interesting to the average 

 reader as it is important to the man of science. The germs 

 of almost everything developed in his later writings can be 

 discovered here ; notably the germ of his most character- 



