DARWIN MEMORIAL CELEBRATION 
19 
Others besides Henslow, however, contributed to the fixation of 
Darwin’s inborn talents and abilities, but Darwin never admitted that 
he received, either at Edinburgh or at Cambridge, any thing like syste¬ 
matic mental training. He was, from the beginning of his school days to 
the end of his university life, a person set apart for individual preparation 
for a special and peculiar career. When he bade farewell to Christ’s College, 
Cambridge, in the summer of 1831, his actual education was yet to be ac¬ 
quired, but not through human instruction. He has himself declared: 
“I have always felt that I owe to the voyage the first real training or educa¬ 
tion of my mind.” 
It was therefore no professional scientist who eagerly accepted the 
unsalaried post of naturalist to the Beagle expedition around the world, 
but a modest, though confident, youth of twenty-two whose most impor¬ 
tant article of outfit was the first volume of the first edition of Lyell’s “Prin¬ 
ciples of Geology,” which had been published the year before, the second 
volume of which was not issued until after Darwin had reached South 
America. Thus it was providentially ordered that during the formative 
period covered by this epoch-making voyage, Darwin should remain as free 
as possible from human influences. If, instead of proceeding, raw as he 
was, directly from the seclusion of the university to the isolation of the 
voyage, he had directed his steps to the metropolis and had there mingled 
with the leaders in scientific thought, it is quite possible, if not probable, 
that he would have fallen under their authority and would have accepted 
the orthodox beliefs of his time. If that had been the case, we might be 
dominated to-day by the prohibitive doctrine of the immutability of species, 
instead of enjoying that freedom of thought and liberty of investigation to 
which Darwin made us heirs. But, happily for the intellectual world, 
during the five years which Darwin spent on the Beagle, under the intimate 
tutelage of mother nature, he laid, for our benefit, as well as for his own, 
the solid foundations of his never failing habit of mind in which open-eyed 
teachableness ever supplemented unwavering honesty of purpose and fear¬ 
lessness of approach. 
After Darwin’s return from the circumnavigation of the globe, he re¬ 
sided, for a little more than five years, in London, and that was the only 
portion of his life during which he was in actual personal contact with any 
considerable number of his fellowmen. Even then, however, he was mostly 
engaged with his own thoughts, for he was arranging his collections and 
preparing for publication the results of his observations made while on the 
Beagle voyage. It was at the very beginning of this residence in London 
(July, 1837), while the things he had seen in South America and the Pacific 
Islands were still fresh in his memory that he opened his first note-book 
