426 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. 



1831 ; that of M. A. in 1837, after his return from South 

 America. 



It is said that Darwin was a keen fox-hunter in his youth, 

 — not a bad pursuit for the cultivation of the observing pow- 

 ers. There is good authority for the statement — though it 

 has nowhere been made in print — that at Cambridge he was 

 disposed at one time to make the Church his profession, fol- 

 lowing the example of Buckland and of his teacher, Sedg- 

 wick. But in 1831, just as he was taking his bachelor's de- 

 gree, Captain Fitzroy offered to receive into his own cabin 

 any naturalist who was disposed to accompany him in the 

 Beagle's surveying voyage round the world. Mr. Darwin 

 volunteered his services without salary, with the condition 

 only that he should have the disposal of his own collections. 

 And this expedition of nearly five years — from the latter 

 part of September, 1831, to the close of October, 1836 — not 

 only fixed the course and character of the young naturalist's 

 life-work, but opened to his mind its principal problems and 

 suggested the now familiar solution of them. For he brought 

 back with him to England a conviction that the existing spe- 

 cies of animals and plants are the modified descendants of 

 earlier forms, and that the internecine struggle for life in 

 which these modifiable forms must have been engaged would 

 scientifically explain the changes. The noteworthy point is 

 that both the conclusion and the explanation were the legiti- 

 mate outcome of real scientific investigation. It is an equally 

 noteworthy fact, and a characteristic of Darwin's mind, that 

 these pregnant ideas were elaborated for more than twenty 

 years before he gave them to the world. Offering fruit so 

 well ripened upon the bough, commending the conclusions he 

 had so thoroughly matured by the presentation of very various 

 lines of facts, and of reasonings close to the facts, unmixed 

 with figments and a priori conceptions, it is not so surprising 

 that his own convictions should at the close of the next twenty 

 years be generally shared by scientific men. It is certainly 

 gratifying that he should have lived to see it, and also have 

 outlived most of the obloquy and dread which the promulga- 

 tion of these opinions aroused. 



