CHARLES DARWIN 125 



Charles Darwin was born in 1809 at Shrewsbury, 

 where his father was a well-known medical man. His 

 mother was a daughter of the founder of the famous 

 Wedgwood Potteries. It is rather amusing to read 

 how Darwin's early teachers looked upon him as not far 

 removed from a dunce. These were the days when 

 higher education was considered as synonymous with 

 an intimate knowledge of the classics, and it is on record 

 that his headmaster publicly reprimanded Darwin for 

 " wasting his time on such a contemptible subject as 

 chemistry." " Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in 

 illis," and the narrow-minded classicist who regards Latin 

 and Greek as the one and only basis of a liberal education 

 is rapidly succumbing to the fate that has overtaken the 

 Lepidodendron and the Ichthyosaurus. " The^Sghoo 

 as a means of education to me was simply" a ..blank," 

 Darwin himself writes, and Huxley adds, " As a matter 

 of fact Darwin's school education left him ignorant of 

 almost all the things which it would have been well for 

 him to know, and untrained in all things it would have 

 been useful for him to be able to do in after life. Drawing^ 

 practice in English composition, and instruction in the 

 elements of the physical sciences would not only have 

 been infinitely valuable to him in reference to his future 

 career, but would have furnished the discipline suited 

 to his faculties, whatever that career might be." 



Darwin does not appear to have been much more of 

 a success at college than he was at school. At Edinburgh, 

 where he went to study medicine, he found the professors 

 " intolerably dull," and says that the lectures of the 

 professor of Materia Medica were " fearful to remember," 

 while he describes the discourses of the professor of 

 Anatomy as having been " as dull as he was himself." 

 As Huxley puts it, " the climax seems to have been 

 attained by the professor of Geology and Zoology, whose 

 praelections were so incredibly dull that they produced 

 in their hearer the somewhat rash determination nevef 



