A FEW OF DARWIN'S FACTS 45 



i . He gathered facts. 



2. He drew conclusions from his facts. 



Even before he was eight years old he collected shells and 

 compared them with each other. Next he began beetle col- 

 lecting. He was now a university student in Cambridge, 

 England, and wherever he went in his walks, he was ready to 

 see beetles and to seize them. This brought him to grief one 

 day, for, as he says, " on tearing off some old bark, I saw two 

 rare beetles, and seized one in each hand ; then I saw a third 

 and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped 

 the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas, 

 it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue 

 so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as 

 was the third one." 



And this is but a sample of Darwin's enthusiasm from 

 youth to old age ; he never lost it. On every side he gathered 

 facts, and when he had facts enough, he began to draw con- 

 clusions. No doubt his largest field for facts was South 

 America. When he was twenty-two years old, he was asked 

 to go as naturalist on board the Beagle} He accepted the 

 invitation ; spent five years in sailing from one country to 

 another ; made collections everywhere ; and when he reached 

 home again in 1836, he was laden with treasures and with 

 the memory of his experiences. 



While in South America he came upon unnumbered fossil 

 bones of buried monsters — creatures that had lived there and 



1 This was a sailing vessel of 235 tons displacement. It was sent out 

 on a voyage of scientific investigation by the English government, and 

 Darwin went as naturalist for the expedition. As he himself states it, " The 

 real object of the expedition was to complete the survey of Patagonia and 

 Tierra del Fuego, to survey the shores of Chile, Peru, and some islands 

 of the Pacific, and to carry a chain of chronometrical measurements around 

 the world." 



