J^ODERN EVOLUTION. 127 



December, 1831, till October, 1836; that he pub- 

 lished his epoch-making Origin of Species in No- 

 vember, 1859; and that he was buried by the side 

 of Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey on the 

 26th of April, 1882. 



As with not a few other men of " light and lead- 

 ing," neither school nor university did much for him, 

 nor did his boyhood give indication of future great- 

 ness. In his answers to the series of questions ad- 

 dressed to various scientific men in 1873 by his dis- 

 tinguished cousin, Francis Galton, he says : " I con- 

 sider that all I have learnt of any value has been 

 self-taught," and he adds that his education fostered 

 no methods of observation or reasoning. Of the 

 Shrewsbury Grammar School, where, after the death 

 of his mother (daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, the 

 celebrated potter), in his ninth year, he was placed 

 as a boarder till his sixteenth year, he tells us, in the 

 modest and candid Autobiography printed in the 

 Life and Letters, " nothing could have been worse 

 for the development of my mind." All that he was 

 taught were the classics, and a little ancient geog- 

 raphy and history; no mathematics, and no modern 

 languages. Happily, he had inherited a taste for 

 natural history and for collecting, his spoils includ- 

 ing not only shells and plants, but also coins and 

 seals. When the fact that he helped his brother in 

 chemical experiments became known to Dr. Butler, 

 the head-master, that desiccated pedagogue publicly 

 rebuked him " for wasting time on such useless sub- 



