DARWIN MEMORIAL CELEBRATION 
17 
world was awaiting a liberator. Finally the revolution was proclaimed and 
the first decisive blow struck by the publication of “The Origin of Species” 
on the twenty-fourth of November, 1859. It was no hasty and ill-considered 
stroke. Events had been shaping themselves to this end since the twenty- 
seventh of December, 1831, when the little brig Beagle sailed from Plymouth 
harbor, bearing the unknown and youthful Charles Darwin to the discovery 
of a new world — not, however, an unexplored continent to be claimed for 
commerce and civilization, but a vastly greater and more valuable realm of 
thought to be opened to knowledge and conquered for intellectual freedom. 
Darwin, like the prophets of old, in preparation for his exalted mission, 
betook himself to the uninhabited wilderness, away from the domination of 
other minds, in order that he might draw inspiration from untrammeled and 
clarifying communion with nature. In his narrow cabin on the broad 
Atlantic, on the desert plains of Patagonia, on desolate and unpeopled 
islands of the Pacific, in the dark and solemn forests of the tropics, and on 
the summits of the bleak and barren Andes he gained the coveted prize of 
wisdom which had been denied him in the populous halls of two great 
universities, where his free spirit had rebelled against the rigid conven¬ 
tionality of classical education. 
Although a born investigator, he had been driven and harassed for four¬ 
teen years by unthinking instructors devoid of both the ability and the 
disposition to consider his natural endowments 1 and inclinations and who, 
with one or two exceptions, according to his own later judgment, wasted 
their time upon an unappreciative and discouraging pupil. He says of 
himself that he was slow in learning, but a review of his productive life 
clearly shows that, if he was dull in any respect, it was solely in the matter 
of accepting ideas at second hand. It happened, merely, that what most 
of his teachers were prepared to impart he was not constituted to receive; 
and so one of the acutest observers the world has ever known was thought to 
be inattentive and unreceptive. During all the school days of his childhood, 
passed in his native town of Shrewsbury, not only were his superb mental 
gifts wholly unrecognized, but no attempt was ever made to find out if he 
had any such gifts. He spent seven useless years at Dr. Butler’s so-called 
“great school,” but, apparently, the head master never came to know his 
talented pupil, for the educational system which prevailed in that institution 
had no reference to “the discovery of the exceptional man.” The one 
ceaseless effort of his schoolmasters was to crowd him into the common mold. 
Receiving no sympathy and little assistance from those who should 
have been the guides and advisers of his boyhood, he developed “a strong 
taste for long solitary walks” and cultivated the habit of stealing time for 
more or less surreptitious collecting in several departments of natural history. 
