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How hushed and quiet the gaunt poplars Is there no other flower for thee to take? spring

Where the song-weary thrush, head under See how I bow myself before thy mightwing,

From The Contemporary Review. THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF CHARLES

DARWIN.

ness.

known him. Men had ample material for judging of his work, and in the end had given their judgment with general acclaim. By the universal consent of mankind, Of the man himself, however, they could the name of Charles Darwin was placed know but little, yet enough of his character even during his lifetime among those of shone forth in his work to indicate its tenthe few great leaders who stand forth for derness and goodness. Men instinctively all time as the creative spirits who have felt him to be in every way one of the founded and legislated for the realm of great ones of the earth, whose removal science. It is too soon to estimate with from the living world leaves mankind precision the full value and effect of his poorer in moral worth as well as in intelwork. The din of controversy that rose lect. So widespread has been this conaround him has hardly yet died down, viction, that the story of his life has been and the influence of the doctrines he pro- eagerly longed for. It would contain no pounded is extending into so many remote eventful incidents, but it would reveal the departments of human inquiry, that a gen-man as he was, and show the method of eration or two may require to pass away his working and the secret of his greatbefore his true place in the history of thought can be definitely fixed. But the judgment of his contemporaries as to his proud pre-eminence is not likely ever to be called in question. He is enrolled among dii majorum gentium, and there he will remain to the end of the ages. When he was laid beside the illustrious dead in Westminster Abbey, there arose far and wide a lamentation as of personal bereavement. Thousands of mourners who had never seen him, who knew only his writings, and judged of the gentleness and courtesy of his nature from these and from such hearsay reports as passed outwards from the privacy of his country home, grieved as for the loss of a dear friend. It is remarkable that probably no scientific man of his day was personally less familiar to the mass of his fellowcountrymen. He seemed to shun all the usual modes of contact with them. His weak health, domestic habits, and absorb ing work kept him in the seclusion of his own quiet home. His face was seldom to be seen at the meetings of scientific societies, or at those gatherings where the discoveries of science are expounded to more popular audiences. He shrank from public controversy, although no man was ever more vigorously attacked and more completely misrepresented. Nevertheless, when he died the affectionate regret that followed him to the grave came not alone from his own personal friends, but from thousands of sympathetic mourners in all parts of the world, who had never seen or

At last, five years and a half after his death, the long-expected memoir has made its appearance. The task of preparing it was undertaken by his son, Mr. Francis Darwin, who, having for the last eight years of his father's life acted as his assistant, was specially qualified to put the world in possession of a true picture of the inner life of the great naturalist. Most biographies are too long, but in the present case the three goodly volumes will be found to contain not a page too much. The narrative is absorbingly interesting from first to last. The editor, with excellent judgment, allows Darwin himself, as far as possible, to tell his own story in a series of delightful letters, which bring us into the very presence of the earnest student and enthusiastic explorer of nature.

Charles Darwin came of a family which from the beginning of the sixteenth century had been settled on the northern borders of Lincolnshire. Several of his ancestors had been men of literary taste and scientific culture, the most noted of them being his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, the poet and philosopher. His father was a medical man in large practice at Shrewsbury, and his mother, a daughter of Josiah Wedgwood of Etruria. Some interesting reminiscences are given of the father, who must have been a man of uncommon strength of character. He left a large fortune, and thus provided for the career which his son was destined to fulfil.

4

however, the intense satisfaction with
which he followed the clear geometrical
proofs of Euclid, and the pleasure he took
in sitting for hours in an old window of
the school reading Shakespeare. He made
acquaintance, too, with the poetry of
Thomson, Byron, and Scott, but he con-
fesses that in later life, to his great regret,
he lost all pleasure from poetry of any
kind, even from Shakespeare.

The first book that excited in him a wish to travel was a copy of the "Wonders of the World," in the possession of a schoolfellow, which he read with some critical discrimination, for he used to dispute with other boys about the veracity of

Of his own early life and later years, Darwin has left a slight but most interesting sketch in an autobiographical fragment, written late in life for his children, and without any idea of its ever being published. From this outline we learn that he was born at Shrewsbury on the 12th of February, 1809. Shortly before his mother's death, in 1817, he was sent, when eight years old, to a day-school in his native town. But even in the period of childhood he had chosen the favorite occupation of his life; "my taste for natural history," he says, "and more especially for collecting, was well developed. I tried to make out the names of plants, and collected all sorts of things-shells, its statements. Nothing in the school seals, franks, coins, and minerals. The life could daunt his ardor in the pursuit of passion for collecting which leads a man natural history. He continued to be a to be a systematic naturalist, a virtuoso, collector, and began to show himself an or a miser, was very strong in me, and attentive observer of insects and birds. was clearly innate, as none of my sisters White's "Selborne," which has started so or brothers ever had this taste." Accord- many naturalists on their career, stimuing to his own account, he was "in many lated his zeal, and he became so fond of ways a naughty boy." But there must birds as to wonder in his mind why every have been so much fun and kindhearted- gentleman did not become an ornitholoness in his transgressions, that neither gist. Nor were his interests confined to parents nor teachers could have been very the biological departments of nature. seriously offended by his pranks. What, for instance, could be said to a boy who would gravely pretend to a schoolfellow that he could produce variously tinted flowers by watering them with colored fluids, or who gathered a quantity of fruit from his father's trees, hid it in the shrubbery, and then ran off to announce his discovery of a robbery; or who, after beating a puppy, felt such remorse that the memory of the act lay heavy on his conscience and remained with him to old age? In 1818 he was placed under Dr. Butler in Shrewsbury School, where he continued to stay for seven years until 1825, when he was sixteen years old. He con-young Darwin's education, and he was fesses that the classical training at that seminary was useless to him, and that the school as a means of education was, so far as he was concerned, simply a blank. Verse-making, and learning by heart so many lines of Latin or Greek, seem to have been the occupations of school that specially dwelt in his memory, the sole pleasure he could recall being the reading of some of Horace's odes. He describes,

With his brother, who had made a laboratory in the garden tool-house, he worked hard at chemistry, and learned for the first time the meaning of experimental research. These extra-scholastic pursuits, which he declares to have been the best part of his education at school, came somehow to be talked of by his companions, who consequently nicknamed him "Gas;" and Dr. Butler, when he heard of them, rebuked the young philosopher for "wasting time on such useless subjects," and called him a poco curante. It was evident to his father that further attendance at Shrewsbury School would not advance

accordingly sent in 1825, when he was a little over sixteen years old, to join his elder brother, who was attending the medical classes of the University of Edinburgh. It was intended that he should begin the study of medicine, and qualify himself for that profession; but he had already discovered that a sufficient competence would eventually come to him to enable him to live in some comfort and independence.

rose even long before day, in order to reach the ground betimes, and went to bed with his shooting-boots placed open close beside him, that not a moment might be lost in getting into them.

So he went to the lectures with no veryments, he became an ardent sportsman, strong determination to get from them as much good as if he knew that his living was to depend on his success. He found them "intolerably dull," and records in maturer years his deliberate conviction that "there are no advantages, and many When two sessions had been passed at disadvantages, in lectures compared with Edinburgh and no great zeal appeared for reading." That he did not conquer his the medical profession, Darwin's father repugnance to the study of anatomy in proposed to him that he should become a particular is remarkable, when we con- clergyman, for it was out of the question sider how strong already was his love of that the young student should be allowed biology, and how wholly it dominated his to turn into an idle sporting man, as he later life. Tenderness of nature seems to bade fair to do. After some time given have had much to do with his repugnance. to reflection on this momentous change in He could not bear the sight of suffering; his career, Darwin, who "did not then in the cases in the clinical wards of the in- the least doubt the strict and literal truth firmary distressed him, and after bringing of every word in the Bible," agreed to the himself to attend for the first time the proposal. Many years afterwards, when operating theatre, he rushed away before he had risen to fame, and his photograph the operations were completed, and never was the subject of public discussion at went back. But he afterwards came to a German psychological society, he was regard as one of the greatest evils of his declared by one of the speakers to have life that he had not been urged to conquer "the bump of reverence developed enough his disgust and make himself practically for ten priests." So that in one respect, familiar with the details of human anat as he says of himself, he was well fitted to omy. It is curious, too, to learn with be a clergyman. In another and more what aversion he regarded the instructions serious qualification, however, he found of the professor of natural history in the himself lamentably and almost incredibly university. Jameson could certainly kin- deficient. If his two years at Edinburgh dle, or at least stimulate, enthusiasm in had not added much to his stock of prosome young souls, as the brilliant band of fessional knowledge, they seem to have naturalists trained under him in Edward driven out of his head what slender share Forbes's time sufficiently proves. But to of classical learning he had imbibed at others he undoubtedly was, what Darwin Shrewsbury. He had actually forgotten describes him, "incredibly dull." If the some of the Greek letters, and had to professorial teaching was defective, how- begin again, therefore, at the very beginever, the loss seems to have been in good ning. But after a few months of prelimimeasure made up by the companionship nary training he found himself able to of fellow-students of kindred tastes, with proceed to Cambridge in the early part whom the future naturalist explored the of the year 1828, he being then nearly neighborhood of Edinburgh. Collecting nineteen years of age. So far as conanimals from the tidal pools of the estuary cerned academical studies, the three years of the Forth, and accompanying the New at the university were, in his own opinion, haven fishermen in their dredging voyages as much wasted time as his residence at for oysters, he found plenty of material Edinburgh or his life at school had been. for study, and employed himself in dis- He attempted mathematics, which he secting as well as he could. In the course found repugnant. In classics he did as of these observations he made his first little as he could; but in the end he took recorded discovery, which was "that the his B.A. degree, and got the tenth place so-called ova of Flustra had the power of on the list of those who did not go in for independent movement by means of cilia, honors. The disgust for geology with and were, in fact, larvæ." As a part of which the Wernerian doctrines at Edinhis love of nature and out-of-door employ-burgh had inspired him, prevented him