A COMMON ERROR CORRECTED 61 



to Fitz-Roy in 1840 and to Lyell in 1841 speak 

 despondently of the prospects of future work and 

 seem to indicate that Darwin felt the weakness 

 even more severely than in the later years of his 

 life. 



' These two conditions — permanent ill-health and a 

 passionate love of scientific work for its own sake — deter- 

 mined thus early in his career, the character of his whole 

 future life. They impelled him to lead a retired life of 

 constant labour, carried on to the utmost limits of his 

 physical power, a life which signally falsified his melancholy 

 prophecy.' ' 



It was an inevitable result of this permanent 

 ill health which prevented Darwin in the later 

 years of his life from saying with Huxley, ' I 

 warmed both hands before the fire of life.' ^ 

 When his health was at its best Darwin could 

 only work four hours, or at most four and a half 

 hours in the day ; when it was worse than usual 

 the period was reduced to an hour or an hour and 

 a half, while for long stretches of time — many 

 months together — he could do no work at all. 

 I have already said that work was necessary for 



* Life and Letters, i. 272. See also iii. 91, where Mr. Francis 

 Darwin shows that the necessity for constant labour became even 

 more imperative in later years. ' He could not rest, and he 

 recognized with regret the gradual change in his mind that 

 rendered continuous work more and more necessary to him as he 

 grew older.' The passage refers to the years 1867 and 1868. 



2 The first line of Landor's beautiful and dignified verse would 

 have been hardly appropriate to Huxley, although singularly so 

 to Darwin : — 



'I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. 



Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art : 

 I warmed both hands before the fire of life : 

 It sinks, and 1 am ready to depart.' 



