454 Charles Darwin. 



It is said that Darwin was a keen fox-hunter in his youth, — 

 not a bad pursuit for the cultivation of the observing powers. 

 There is good authority for the statement — though it has 

 nowhere been made in print — that at Cambridge he was dis- 

 posed at one time to make the Church his profession, following 

 the example of Buckland and of his teacher, Sedgwick. But 

 in 1831, just as he was taking his bachelor's degree, Captain 

 Fitzroy offered to receive into his own cabin any naturalist who 

 was disposed to accompany him in the Beagle's surveying 

 voyage round the world. Mr. Darwin volunteered his services 

 wiihout salary, with the condition only that he should have the 

 disposal of his own collections. And this expedition of nearly 

 five years — from the latter part of September, 1831, to the close 

 of October, 1836— not only fixed the course and character of 

 the young naturalist's life-work, but opened to his mind its 

 principal problems and suggested the now familiar solution of 

 them. For he brought back with him to England a conviction 

 that the existing species of animals and plants are the modified 

 descendants of earlier forms, and that the internecine struggle 

 for life in which these modifiable forms must have been engaged 

 would scientifically explain the changes. The noteworthy point 

 is that both the conclusion and the explanation were the legit- 

 imate outcome of real scientific investigation. It is an equally 

 noteworthy fact, and a characteristic of Darwin's mind, that 

 these pregnant ideas were elaborated for more than twenty 

 years before he gave them to the world. Offering fruit so well 

 ripened upon the bough, commending the conclusions be had 

 so thoroughly matured by the presentation of very various lines 

 of facts, and of reasonings close to the facts, unmixed with 

 figments and d priori conceptions, it is not so surprising that 

 his own convictions should at the close of the next twenty 

 years be generally shared by scientific men. It is certainly 

 gratifying 'that he should have lived to see it, and also have 

 outlived most of the obloquy and dread which the promulga- 

 tion of these opinions aroused. 



Mr. Darwin lived a very quiet and uneventful life. In 1839 

 he married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, who with five sons 

 and two daughters survives him; he made his home on the 

 border of the little hamlet of Down, in Kent,— "a plain but 



