224 THE VOYAGE. ,ETAT. 22. 



Buffer more from sea-sickness now than three years ago." 

 Admiral Lort Stokes wrote to the Times, April 25, 1883 : 



"May I beg a corner for my feeble testimony to the 

 marvellous persevering endurance in the cause of science of 

 that great naturalist, my old and lost friend, Mr. Charles 

 Darwin, whose remains are so very justly to be honoured 

 with a resting-place in Westminster Abbey ? 



" Perhaps no one can better testify to his early and most 

 trying labours than myself. We worked together for several 

 years at the same table in the poop cabin of the Beagle 

 during her celebrated voyage, he with his microscope and 

 ;myself at the charts. It was often a very lively end of 

 the little craft, and distressingly so to my old friend, who 

 suffered greatly from sea-sickness. After, perhaps, an hour's 

 work he would say to me, ' Old fellow, I must take the hori- 

 zontal for it,' that being the best relief position from ship 

 motion ; a stretch out on one side of the table for some time 

 would enable him to resume his labours for a while, when he 

 had again to lie down. 



"It was distressing to witness this early sacrifice of Mr. 

 Darwin's health, who ever afterwards seriously felt the ill- 

 effects of the Beagtis voyage." 



Mr. A. B. Usborne writes, " He was a dreadful sufferer 

 from sea-sickness, and at times, when I have been officer 

 of the watch, and reduced the sails, making the ship more 

 easy, and thus relieving him, I have been pronounced by him 

 to be ' a good officer,' and he would resume his microscopic 

 observations in the poop cabin." The amount of work that 

 he got through on the Beagle shows that he was habitually 

 in full vigour ; he, had, however, one severe illness in South 

 America, when he was received into the house of an English- 

 man, Mr. Corfield, who tended him with careful kindness. 

 I have heard him say that in this illness every secretion of 

 the body was affected, and that when he described the 



