38 FIFTY YEARS OF DARWINISM 



W. J. Burchell, in one of his letters^ to Sir 

 William Hooker, points out that the feelings of 

 awe and wonder aroused in a Brazilian forest are 

 not to be expected in those to whom the sight is 

 familiar. As regards the depth and nature of 

 the effects produced by the experiences here re- 

 ferred to, it would be very interesting to com- 

 pare the savage with the civilized man, the uned- 

 ucated with the educated mind. That the results 

 are intimately bound up with the psychological 

 differences between individuals — in part inherent, 

 in part due to training and experience — ^is well 

 illustrated in a story told by the late Charles 

 Dudley Warner, who took two EngUsh friends 

 to see for the first time the Grand Canyon of 

 the Colorado. When they reached the point 

 where the whole prospect — ^boundless beyond im- 

 agination — ^is revealed in a moment of time, one 

 of his friends burst into tears, while the other 

 reheved his feehngs by unbridled blasphemy. 



The remarkable psychological effects of a 

 grandeur far transcending and far removed from 

 ordinary experience may be compared to the 

 thrilP so often felt on hearing majestic music, a 

 thrill we do not seek to explain as a faint, far-off 

 reminiscence of dread inspired by the savage war- 

 cry. I do not doubt that an explanation of the 

 sublime based on the terrors of our primitive an- 



' Preserved in the Library at Kew, but, I believe, as yet unpub- 

 lished. 



' Darwin spoke of his backbone shivering during the anthem 

 in King's College chapel. Life and Letters, I, p. 49; see also 

 p. 170. 



