EARLY DAYS.
As the Chester express steams out of Shrewsbury station, you see on your
left, overhanging the steep bank of Severn, a large, square,
substantial-looking house, known as the Mount, the birthplace of the
author of the 'Origin of Species.' There, in the comfortable home he had
built for himself, Dr. Robert Darwin, the father, lived and worked for
fifty years of unobtrusive usefulness. He had studied medicine at
Edinburgh and Leyden, and had even travelled a little in Germany, before
he settled down in the quiet old Salopian town, where for half a century
his portly figure and yellow chaise were familiar objects of the
country-side for miles around. Among a literary society which included
Coleridge's friends, the Tayleurs, and where Hazlitt listened with
delight to the great poet's 'music of the spheres,' in High Street
Unitarian Chapel, the Mount kept up with becoming dignity the family
traditions of the Darwins and the Wedgwoods as a local centre of
sweetness and light.
On February the 12th, 1809, Charles Darwin first saw the light of day in
this his father's house at Shrewsbury. Time and place were both
propitious. Born in a cultivated scientific family, surrounded from his
birth by elevating influences, and secured beforehand from the cramping
necessity of earning his own livelihood by his own exertions, the boy
was destined to grow up to full maturity in the twenty-one years of slow
development that immediately preceded the passing of the first Reform
Act. The thunder of the great European upheaval had grown silent at
Waterloo when he was barely six years old, and his boyhood was passed
amid country sights and sounds during that long period of reconstruction
and assimilation which followed the fierce volcanic outburst of the
French Revolution. Happy in the opportunity of his birth, he came upon
the world eight years after the first publication of Lamarck's
remarkable speculations, and for the first twenty-two years of his life
he was actually the far younger contemporary of the great French
evolutionary philosopher. Eleven years before his arrival upon the scene
Malthus had set forth his 'Principle of Population.' Charles Darwin thus
entered upon a stage well prepared for him, and he entered it with an
idiosyncrasy exactly adapted for making the best of the situation. The
soil had been thoroughly turned and dressed beforehand: Charles Darwin's
seed had only to fall upon it in order to spring up and bear fruit a
hundredfold, in every field of science or speculation.
For it was not biology alone that he was foredoomed to revolutionise,
but the whole range of human thought, and perhaps even ultimately of
human action.
Is it mere national prejudice which makes one add with congratulatory
pleasure that Darwin was born in England, rather than in France, in
Germany, or in America? Perhaps so; perhaps not. For the English
intellect does indeed seem more capable than most of uniting high
speculative ability with high practical skill and experience: and of
that union of rare qualities Darwin himself was a most conspicuous
example. It is probable that England has produced more of the great
organising and systematising intellects than any other modern country.
Among those thinkers in his own line who stood more nearly abreast of
Darwin in the matter of age, Lyell was some eleven years his senior, and
contributed not a little (though quite unconsciously) by his work and
conclusions to the formation of Darwin's own peculiar scientific
opinions. The veteran Owen, who still survives him, was nearly five
years older than Darwin, and also helped to a great extent in giving
form and exactness to his great contemporary's anatomical ideas.
Humboldt, who preceded our English naturalist in the matter of time by
no less than forty years, might yet almost rank as coeval in some
respects, owing to his long and active life, his late maturity, and the
very recent date of his greatest and most thought-compelling work, the
'Cosmos' (begun when Humboldt was seventy-five, and finished when he
lacked but ten years of his century), in itself a sort of preparation
for due acceptance of the Darwinian theories. In fact, as many as fifty
years of their joint lives coincided entirely one with the other's.
Agassiz antedated Darwin by two years. On the other hand, among the men
who most helped on the recognition of Darwin's theories, Hooker and
Lewes were his juniors by eight years, Herbert Spencer by eleven,
Wallace by thirteen, and Huxley by sixteen. His cousin, Francis Galton,
another grandson of Erasmus Darwin, and joint inheritor of the
distinctive family biological ply, was born at the same date as Alfred
Russell Wallace, thirteen years after Charles Darwin. In such a goodly
galaxy of workers was the Darwinian light destined to shine through the
middle of the century, as one star excelleth another in glory.
Charles Darwin was the second son: but nature refuses doggedly to
acknowledge the custom of primogeniture. His elder brother, Erasmus, a
man of mute and inarticulate ability, with a sardonic humour alien to
his race, extorted unwonted praise from the critical pen of Thomas
Carlyle, who 'for intellect rather preferred him to his brother
Charles.' But whatever spark of the Darwinian genius was really innate
in Erasmus the Less died with him unacknowledged.
The boy was educated (so they call it) at Shrewsbury Grammar School,
under sturdy Sam Butler, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield; and there he
picked up so much Latin and Greek as was then considered absolutely
essential to the due production of an English gentleman. Happily for the
world, having no taste for the classics, he escaped the ordeal with
little injury to his individuality. His mother had died while he was
still a child, but his father, that 'acute observer,' no doubt taught
him to know and love nature. At sixteen he went to Edinburgh University,
then rendered famous by a little knot of distinguished professors, and
there he remained for two years. Already at school he had made himself
notable by his love of collecting--the first nascent symptom of the
naturalist bent. He collected everything, shells, eggs, minerals,
coins, nay, since postage stamps were then not yet invented, even
franks. But at Edinburgh he gave the earliest distinct evidence of his
definite scientific tastes by contributing to the local academic society
a paper on the floating eggs of the common sea-mat, in which he had even
then succeeded in discovering for the first time organs of locomotion.
Thence he proceeded to Christ's College, Cambridge. The Darwins were
luckily a Cambridge family: luckily, let us say, for had it been
otherwise--had young Darwin been distorted from his native bent by Plato
and Aristotle, and plunged deep into the mysteries of Barbara and
Celarent, as would infallibly have happened to him at the sister
university--who can tell how long we might have had to wait in vain for
the 'Origin of Species' and the 'Descent of Man'? But Cambridge, which
rejoiced already in the glory of Newton, was now to match it by the
glory of Darwin. In its academical course, the mathematical wedge had
always kept open a dim passage for physical science; and at the exact
moment when Darwin was an undergraduate at Christ's--from 1827 to
1831--the university had the advantage of several good scientific
teachers, and amongst them one, Professor Henslow, a well-known
botanist, who took a special interest in young Darwin's intellectual
development. There, too, he met with Sedgwick, Airy, Ramsay, and
numerous other men of science, whose intercourse with him must no doubt
have contributed largely to mould and form the future cast of his
peculiar philosophical idiosyncrasy.
It was to Henslow's influence that Darwin in later years attributed in
great part his powerful taste for natural history. But in truth the
ascription of such high praise to his early teacher smacks too much of
the Darwinian modesty to be accepted at once without demur by the candid
critic. The naturalist, like the poet, is born, not made. How much more,
then, must this needs be the case with the grandson of Erasmus Darwin
and of Josiah Wedgwood? As a matter of fact, already at Edinburgh the
lad had loved to spend his days among the sea-beasts and wrack of the
Inches in the Firth of Forth; and it was through the instrumentality of
his 'brother entomologists' that he first became acquainted with Henslow
himself when he removed to Cambridge. The good professor could not make
him into a naturalist: inherited tendencies and native energies had done
that for him already from his very cradle.
'Doctrina sed vim promovet insitam;' and it was well that Darwin took up
at Cambridge with the study of geology as his first love. For geology
was then the living and moving science, as astronomy had been in the
sixteenth century, and as biology is at the present day--the
growing-point, so to speak, of European development, whence all great
things might naturally be expected. Moreover, it was and is the central
science of the concrete class, having relations with astronomy on the
one hand, and with biology on the other; concerned alike with cosmical
chances or changes on this side, and with the minutest facts of organic
nature on that; the meeting-place and border-land of all the separate
branches of study that finally bear upon the complex problems of our
human life. No other subject of investigation was so well calculated to
rouse Darwin's interest in the ultimate questions of evolution or
creation, of sudden cataclysm or gradual growth, of miraculous
intervention or slow development. Here, if anywhere, his enigmas were
all clearly propounded to him by the inarticulate stony sphinxes; he had
only to riddle them out for himself as he went along in after years with
the aid of the successive side-lights thrown upon the world by the
unconnected lanterns of Lamarck and of Malthus.
Fortunately for us, then, Darwin did not waste his time at Cambridge
over the vain and frivolous pursuits of the classical tripos. He
preferred to work at his own subjects in his own way, and to leave the
short-lived honours of the schools to those who cared for them and for
nothing higher. He came out with the _οἱ πολλοί_ in 1831, and
thenceforth proceeded to study life in the wider university for which
his natural inclinations more properly fitted him. The world was all
before him where to choose, and he chose that better part which shall
not be taken away from him as long as the very memory of science
survives.