DARWIN'S WANDER-YEARS.
Scarcely had Darwin taken his pass degree at Cambridge when the great
event of his life occurred which, more than anything else perhaps, gave
the final direction to his categorical genius in the line it was
thenceforth so successfully to follow. In the autumn of 1831, when
Darwin was just twenty-two, it was decided by Government to send a
ten-gun brig, the 'Beagle,' under command of Captain Fitzroy, to
complete the unfinished survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, to map
out the shores of Chili and Peru, to visit several of the Pacific
archipelagoes, and to carry a chain of chronometrical measurements round
the whole world. This was an essentially scientific expedition, and
Captain Fitzroy, afterwards so famous as the meteorological admiral, was
a scientific officer of the highest type. He was anxious to be
accompanied on his cruise by a competent naturalist who would undertake
the collection and preservation of the animals and plants discovered on
the voyage, for which purpose he generously offered to give up a share
of his own cabin accommodation. Professor Henslow seized upon the
opportunity to recommend for the post his promising pupil, young Darwin,
'grandson of the poet.' Darwin gladly volunteered his services without
salary, and partly paid his own expenses on condition of being permitted
to retain in his own possession the animals and plants he collected on
the journey. The 'Beagle' set sail from Devonport on December the 27th,
1831; she returned to Falmouth on October the 2nd, 1836.
That long five years' cruise around the world, the journal of which
Darwin has left us in the 'Voyage of the "Beagle,"' proved a marvellous
epoch in the great naturalist's quiet career. It left its abiding mark
deeply imprinted on all his subsequent life and thinking. Lamarck and
Erasmus Darwin were cabinet biologists, who had never beheld with their
own eyes the great round world and all that therein is; Charles Darwin
had the inestimable privilege of seeing for himself, at first hand, a
large part of the entire globe and of the creatures that inhabit it.
Even to have caught one passing glimpse of the teeming life of the
tropics is in itself an education; to the naturalist it is more, it is a
revelation. Our starved little northern fauna and flora, the mere
leavings of the vast ice sheets that spread across our zone in the
glacial epoch, show us a world depopulated of all its largest,
strangest, and fiercest creatures; a world dwarfed in all its component
elements, and immensely differing in ten thousand ways from that rich,
luxuriant, over-stocked hot-house in which the first great problems of
evolution were practically worked out by survival of the fittest. But
the tropics preserve for us still in all their jungles something of the
tangled, thickly-peopled aspect which our planet must have presented for
countless ages in all latitudes before the advent of primæval man. We
now know that throughout the greater part of geological time,
essentially tropical conditions existed unbroken over the whole surface
of the entire earth, from the Antarctic continent to the shores of
Greenland; so that some immediate acquaintance at least with the
equatorial world is of immense value to the philosophical naturalist for
the sake of the analogies it inevitably suggests; and it is a
significant fact that almost all those great and fruitful thinkers who
in our own time have done good work in the wider combination of
biological facts have themselves passed a considerable number of years
in investigating the conditions of tropical nature. Europe and England
are at the ends of the earth; the tropics are biological head-quarters.
The equatorial zone is therefore the true school for the historian of
life in its more universal and lasting aspects.
Nor was that all. The particular countries visited by the 'Beagle'
during the course of her long and varied cruise happened to be exactly
such as were naturally best adapted for bringing out the latent
potentialities of Darwin's mind, and suggesting to his active and
receptive brain those deep problems of life and its environment which he
afterwards wrought out with such subtle skill and such consummate
patience in the 'Origin of Species' and the 'Descent of Man.' The Cape
de Verdes, and the other Atlantic islands, with their scanty population
of plants and animals, composed for the most part of waifs and strays
drifted to their barren rocks by ocean currents, or blown out helplessly
to sea by heavy winds; Brazil, with its marvellous contrasting wealth of
tropical luxuriance and self-strangling fertility, a new province of
interminable delights to the soul of the enthusiastic young collector;
the South American pampas, with their colossal remains of extinct
animals, huge geological precursors of the stunted modern sloths and
armadillos that still inhabit the self-same plains; Tierra del Fuego,
with its almost Arctic climate, and its glimpses into the secrets of the
most degraded savage types; the vast range of the Andes and the
Cordilleras, with their volcanic energy and their closely crowded
horizontal belts of climatic life; the South Sea Islands, those
paradises of the Pacific, Hesperian fables true, alike for the lover of
the picturesque and the biological student; Australia, that surviving
fragment of an extinct world, with an antiquated fauna whose archaic
character still closely recalls the European life of ten million years
back in the secondary epoch: all these and many others equally novel and
equally instructive passed in long alternating panorama before Darwin's
eyes, and left their images deeply photographed for ever after on the
lasting tablets of his retentive memory. That was the real great
university in which he studied nature and read for his degree. Our
evolutionist was now being educated.
Throughout the whole of the journal of this long cruise, which Darwin
afterwards published in an enlarged form, it is impossible not to be
struck at every turn with the way in which his inquisitive mind again
and again recurs to the prime elements of those great problems towards
whose solution he afterwards so successfully pointed out the path. The
Darwinian ideas are all already there in the germ; the embryo form of
the 'Origin of Species' plays in and out on every page with the
quaintest elusiveness. We are always just on the very point of catching
it; and every now and again we do actually all but catch it in essence
and spirit, though ever still its bodily shape persistently evades us.
Questions of geographical distribution, of geological continuity, of the
influence of climate, of the modifiability of instinct, of the effects
of surrounding conditions, absorb the young observer's vivid interest at
every step, wherever he lands. He is all unconsciously collecting notes
and materials in profuse abundance for his great work; he is thinking in
rough outline the new thoughts which are hereafter to revolutionise the
thought of humanity.
Five years are a great slice out of a man's life: those five years of
ceaseless wandering by sea and land were spent by Charles Darwin in
accumulating endless observations and hints for the settlement of the
profound fundamental problems in which he was even then so deeply
interested. The 'Beagle' sailed from England to the Cape de Verdes, and
already, even before she had touched her first land, the young
naturalist had observed with interest that the impalpably fine dust
which fell on deck contained no less than sixty-seven distinct organic
forms, two of them belonging to species peculiar to South America. In
some of the dust he found particles of stone so very big that they
measured 'above the thousandth of an inch square;' and after this fact,
says the keen student, 'one need not be surprised at the diffusion of
the far lighter and smaller sporules of cryptogamic plants.' Would
Erasmus Darwin have noticed these minute points and their implications
one wonders? Probably not. May we not see in the observation partly the
hereditary tendencies of Josiah Wedgwood towards minute investigation
and accuracy of detail, partly the influence of the scientific
time-wave, and the careful training under Professor Henslow? Erasmus
Darwin comes before us rather as the brilliant and ingenious amateur,
his grandson Charles as the instructed and fully equipped final product
of the scientific schools.
At St. Paul's Rocks, once more, a mass of new volcanic peaks rising
abruptly from the midst of the Atlantic, the naturalist of the 'Beagle'
notes with interest that feather and dirt-feeding and parasitic insects
or spiders are the first inhabitants to take up their quarters on
recently formed oceanic islands. This problem of the peopling of new
lands, indeed, so closely connected with the evolution of new species,
necessarily obtruded itself upon his attention again and again during
his five years' cruise; and in some cases, especially that of the
Galapagos Islands, the curious insular faunas and floras which he
observed upon this trip, composed as they were of mere casual straylings
from adjacent shores, produced upon his mind a very deep and lasting
impression, whose traces one may without difficulty discern on every
second page of the 'Origin of Species.'
On the last day of February, 1832, the 'Beagle' came to anchor in the
harbour of Bahia, and young Darwin caught sight for the first time of
the mutually strangling luxuriance of tropical vegetation. Nowhere on
earth are the finest conditions of tropical life more fully realised
than in the tangled depths of the great uncleared Brazilian forests,
which everywhere gird round like a natural palisade with their
impenetrable belt the narrow and laborious clearings of over-mastered
man. The rich alluvial silt of mighty river systems, the immemorial
manuring of the virgin soil, the fierce energy of an almost equatorial
sun, and the universal presence of abundant water, combine to make life
in that marvellous region unusually wealthy, varied, and crowded, so
that the struggle for existence is there perhaps more directly visible
to the seeing eye than in any other known portion of God's universe.
'Delight itself,' says Darwin in his journal, with that naive simplicity
which everywhere forms the chief charm of his direct and unaffected
literary style--'delight itself is a weak term to express the feelings
of a naturalist who for the first time has wandered by himself in a
Brazilian forest. The elegance of the grasses, the novelty of the
parasitical plants, the beauty of the flowers, the glossy green of the
foliage, but above all the general luxuriance of the vegetation, filled
me with admiration.' In truth, among those huge buttressed trunks,
overhung by the unbroken canopy of foliage on the vast spreading and
interlacing branches, festooned with lianas and drooping lichens, or
beautified by the pendent alien growth of perfumed orchids, Darwin's
mind must indeed have found congenial food for apt reflection, and
infinite opportunities for inference and induction. Prom the mere
picturesque point of view, indeed, the naturalist enjoys such sights as
this a thousand times more truly and profoundly than the mere casual
unskilled observer: for it is a shallow, self-flattering mistake of
vulgar and narrow minds to suppose that fuller knowledge and clearer
insight can destroy or impair the beauty of beautiful objects--as who
should imagine that a great painter appreciates the sunset less than a
silly boy or a sentimental schoolgirl. As a matter of fact, the
naturalist knows and admires a thousand exquisite points of detail in
every flower and every insect which only he himself and the true artist
can equally delight in. And a keen intellectual and æsthetic joy in the
glorious fecundity and loveliness of nature was everywhere present to
Darwin's mind. But, beyond and above even that, there was also the
architectonic delight of the great organiser in the presence of a noble
organised product: the peculiar pleasure felt only by the man in whose
broader soul all minor details fall at once into their proper place, as
component elements in one great consistent and harmonious whole--a
sympathetic pleasure akin to that with which an architect views the
interior of Ely and of Lincoln, or a musician listens to the linked
harmonies of the 'Messiah' and the 'Creation.' The scheme of nature was
now unfolding itself visibly and clearly before Charles Darwin's very
eyes.
After eighteen memorable days spent with unceasing delight at Bahia, the
'Beagle' sailed again for Rio, where Darwin stopped for three months, to
improve his acquaintance with the extraordinary wealth of the South
American fauna and flora. Collecting insects was here his chief
occupation, and it is interesting to note even at this early period how
his attention was attracted by some of those strange alluring devices on
the part of the males for charming their partners which afterwards
formed the principal basis for his admirable theory of sexual selection,
so fully developed in the 'Descent of Man.' 'Several times,' he says,
'when a pair [of butterflies], probably male and female, were chasing
each other in an irregular course, they passed within a few yards of me;
and I distinctly heard a clicking noise, similar to that produced by a
toothed wheel passing under a spring catch.' In like manner he observed
here the instincts of tropical ants, the habits of phosphorescent
insects, and the horrid practice of that wasp-like creature, the sphex,
which stuffs the clay cells of its larvæ full of half-dead spiders and
writhing caterpillars, so stung with devilish avoidance of vital parts
as to be left quite paralysed yet still alive, as future food for the
developing grubs. Cases like these helped naturally to shake the young
biologist's primitive faith in the cheap and crude current theories of
universal beneficence, and to introduce that wholesome sceptical
reaction against received dogma which is the necessary groundwork and
due preparation for all great progressive philosophical thinking.
In July they set sail again for Monte Video, where the important
question of climate and vegetation began to interest young Darwin's
mind. Uruguay is almost entirely treeless; and this curious phenomenon,
in a comparatively moist sub-tropical plain-land, struck him as a
remarkable anomaly, and set him speculating on its probable cause.
Australia, he remembered, was far more arid, and yet its interior was
everywhere covered by whole forests of quaint indigenous gum-trees.
Could it be that there were no trees adapted to the climate? As yet, the
true causes of geographical distribution had not clearly dawned upon
Darwin's mind; but that a young man of twenty-three should seriously
busy himself about such problems of ultimate causation at all is in
itself a sufficiently pointed and remarkable phenomenon. It was here,
too, that he first saw that curious animal, the Tucutuco, a true rodent
with the habits of a mole, which is almost always found in a blind
condition. With reference to this singular creature, there occurs in his
journal one of those interesting anticipatory passages which show the
rough workings of the distinctive evolutionary Darwinian concept in its
earlier stages. 'Considering the strictly subterranean habits of the
Tucutuco,' he writes, 'the blindness, though so common, cannot be a very
serious evil; yet it appears strange that any animal should possess an
organ frequently subject to be injured. Lamarck would have been
delighted with this fact, had he known it, when speculating (probably
with more truth than usual with him) on the gradually acquired blindness
of the Aspalax, a gnawer living under the ground, and of the Proteus, a
reptile living in dark caverns filled with water; in both of which
animals the eye is in an almost rudimentary state, and is covered by a
tendinous membrane and skin. In the common mole the eye is
extraordinarily small but perfect, though many anatomists doubt whether
it is connected with the true optic nerve; its vision must certainly be
imperfect, though probably useful to the animal when it leaves its
burrow. In the Tucutuco, which I believe never comes to the surface of
the ground, the eye is rather larger, but often rendered blind and
useless, though without apparently causing any inconvenience to the
animal: no doubt Lamarck would have said that the Tucutuco is now
passing into the state of the Aspalax and Proteus.' The passage is
instructive both as showing that Darwin was already familiar with
Lamarck's writings, and as pointing out the natural course of his own
future development.
For the two years from her arrival at Monte Video, the 'Beagle' was
employed in surveying the eastern coast of South America; and Darwin
enjoyed unusual opportunities for studying the geology, the zoology, and
the botany of the surrounding districts during all that period. It was a
suggestive field indeed for the young naturalist. The curious
relationship of the gigantic fossil armour-plated animals to the
existing armadillo, of the huge megatherium to the modern sloths, and of
the colossal ant-eaters to their degenerate descendants at the present
day, formed one of the direct inciting causes to the special study which
produced at last the 'Origin of Species.' In the Introduction to that
immortal work Darwin wrote, some twenty-seven years later, 'When on
board H.M.S. "Beagle" as naturalist, I was much struck with certain
facts in the distribution of the organic beings inhabiting South
America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past
inhabitants of that continent. These facts, as will be seen in the
latter chapters of this volume, seemed to throw some light on the origin
of species--that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by one of
our greatest philosophers.' And in the body of the work itself he refers
over and over again to numberless observations made by himself during
this period of rapid psychological development--observations on the
absence of recent geological formations along the lately upheaved South
American coast; on the strange extinction of the horse in La Plata; on
the affinities of the extinct and recent species; on the effect of
minute individual peculiarities in preserving life under special
circumstances; and on the influence of insects and blood-sucking bats in
determining the existence of the larger naturalised mammals in parts of
Brazil and the Argentine Republic. It was the epoch of wide collection
of facts, to be afterwards employed in brilliant generalisations: the
materials for the 'Origin of Species' were being slowly accumulated in
the numberless pigeon-holes of the Darwinian memory.
Among the facts thus industriously gathered by Darwin in the two years
spent on the South American coast were several curious instincts of the
cuckoo-like molothrus, of the owl of the Pampas, and of the American
ostrich. A few sentences scattered here and there through this part of
the 'Naturalist's Journal' may well be extracted in the present place as
showing, better than any mere secondhand description could do, the slow
germinating process of the 'Origin of Species.' In speaking of the
toxodon, that strange extinct South American mammal, the young author
remarks acutely that, though in size it equalled the elephant and the
megatherium, the structure of its teeth shows it to be closely allied to
the ruminants, while several other details link it to the pachyderms,
and its aquatic peculiarities of ear and nostril approximate it rather
to the manatee and the dugong. 'How wonderfully,' he says, 'are the
different orders, at the present time so well separated, blended
together in different points of the structure of the toxodon.' We now
know that unspecialised ancestral forms always display this close union
of peculiarities afterwards separately developed in distinct species of
their later descendants.
Still more pregnant with evolutionism in the bud is the prophetic remark
about a certain singular group of South American birds, 'This small
family is one of those which, from its varied relations to other
families, although at present offering only difficulties to the
systematic naturalist, ultimately may assist in revealing the grand
scheme, common to the present and past ages, on which organised beings
have been created.' Of the agouti, once more, that true friend of the
desert, Darwin notes that it does not now range as far south as Port St.
Julian, though Wood in 1670 found it abundant there; and he asks
suggestively, 'What cause can have altered, in a wide, uninhabited, and
rarely visited country, the range of an animal like this?' Again, when
speaking of the analogies between the extinct camel-like macrauchenia
and the modern guanaco, as well as of those between the fossil and
living species of South American rodents, he says, with even more
prophetic insight, 'This wonderful relationship in the same continent
between the dead and the living will, I do not doubt, hereafter throw
more light on the appearance of organic beings on our earth, and their
disappearance from it, than any other class of facts.' He was himself
destined in another thirty years to prove the truth of his own
vaticination.
A yet more remarkable passage in the 'Journal of the "Beagle,"' though
entered under the account of events observed in the year 1834, must
almost certainly have been written somewhat later, and subsequently to
Darwin's first reading of Malthus's momentous work, 'The Principle of
Population,' which (as we know from his own pen) formed a cardinal point
in the great biologist's mental development. It runs as follows in the
published journal:[1]--'We do not steadily bear in mind how profoundly
ignorant we are of the conditions of existence of every animal; nor do
we always remember that some check is constantly preventing the too
rapid increase of every organised being left in a state of nature. The
supply of food, on an average, remains constant; yet the tendency in
every animal to increase by propagation is geometrical, and its
surprising effects have nowhere been more astonishingly shown than in
the case of the European animals run wild during the last few centuries
in America. Every animal in a state of nature regularly breeds; yet in a
species long established any great increase in numbers is obviously
impossible, and must be checked by some means.' Aut Malthus aut
Diabolus. And surely here, if anywhere at all, we tremble on the very
verge of natural selection.
It would be impossible to follow young Darwin in detail through his
journey to Buenos Ayres, and up the Parana to Santa Fé, which occupied
the autumn of 1833. In the succeeding year he visited Patagonia and the
Falkland Islands, having previously made his first acquaintance with
savage life among the naked Fuegians of the extreme southern point of
the continent. Some of these interesting natives, taken to England by
Captain Fitzroy on a former visit, had accompanied the 'Beagle' through
all her wanderings, and from them Darwin obtained that close insight
into the workings of savage human nature which he afterwards utilised
with such conspicuous ability in the 'Descent of Man.' Through
Magellan's Straits the party made their way up the coasts of Chili, and
Darwin had there an opportunity of investigating the geology and biology
of the Cordillera. The year 1835 was chiefly spent in that temperate
country and in tropical Peru; and as the autumn went on, the 'Beagle'
made her way across a belt of the Pacific to the Galapagos archipelago.
Small and unimportant as are those little equatorial islands from the
geographical and commercial point of view, they will yet remain for ever
classic ground to the biologists of the future from their close
connection with the master-problems of the 'Origin of Species.' Here
more, perhaps, than anywhere else the naturalist of the 'Beagle' found
himself face to face in real earnest with the ultimate questions of
creation or evolution. A group of tiny volcanic islets, never joined to
any land, nor even united to one another, yet each possessing its own
special zoological features--the Galapagos roused to an extraordinary
degree the irresistible questionings of Darwin's mind. They contain no
frogs, and no mammal save a mouse, brought to them, no doubt, by some
passing ship. The only insects are beetles, which possess peculiar
facilities for being transported in the egg or grub across salt water
upon floating logs. There are two kinds of snake, one tortoise, and four
lizards; but, in striking contrast to this extreme poverty of
terrestrial forms, there are at least fifty-five distinct species of
native birds. A few snails complete the list. Now most of these animals,
though closely resembling the fauna of Ecuador, the nearest mainland,
are specifically distinct; they have varied (as we now know) from their
continental types owing to natural selection under the new circumstances
in which they have been placed. But Darwin had not yet evolved that
potent key to the great riddle of organic existence. He saw the problem,
but not its solution. 'Most of the organic productions,' he says
plainly, 'are aboriginal creations, found nowhere else; there is even a
difference between the inhabitants of the different islands: yet all
show a marked relationship with those of America, though separated from
that continent by an open space of ocean, between 500 and 600 miles in
width.... Considering the small size of these islands, we feel the more
astonished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and at their
confined range. Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and the
boundaries of most of the lava-streams still distinct, we are led to
believe that within a period geologically recent the unbroken sea was
here spread out. Hence, both in space and time we seem to be brought
somewhat nearer to that great fact--that mystery of mysteries--the first
appearance of new beings on this earth.' Among the most singular of
these zoological facts may be mentioned the existence in the Galapagos
archipelago of a genus of gigantic and ugly lizard, the amblyrhyncus,
unknown elsewhere, but here assuming the forms of two species, the one
marine and the other terrestrial. In minuter points, the differences of
fauna and flora between the various islands are simply astounding, so as
to compel the idea that each form must necessarily have been developed
not merely for the group, but for the special island which it actually
inhabits. No wonder that Darwin should say in conclusion, 'One is
astonished at the amount of creative force, if such an expression may be
used, displayed on these small, barren, and rocky islands; and still
more so at its diverse, yet analogous, action on points so near each
other.' Here again, in real earnest, the young observer trembles visibly
on the very verge of natural selection. In the 'Origin of Species' he
makes full use, more than once, of the remarkable facts he observed with
so much interest in these tiny isolated oceanic specks of the American
galaxy.
From the Galapagos the 'Beagle' steered a straight course for Tahiti,
and Darwin then beheld with his own eyes the exquisite beauty of the
Polynesian Islands. Thence they sailed for New Zealand, the most truly
insular large mass of land in the whole world, supplied accordingly with
a fauna and flora of most surprising meagreness and poverty of species.
In the woods, our observer noted very few birds, and he remarks with
astonishment that so big an island--as large as Great Britain--should
not possess a single living indigenous mammal, save a solitary rat of
doubtful origin. Australia and Tasmania, with their antiquated and
stranded marsupial inhabitants, almost completed the round trip. Keeling
Island next afforded a basis for the future famous observations upon
coral reefs; and thence by Mauritius, St. Helena, Ascension, Bahia,
Pernambuco, and the beautiful Azores, the 'Beagle' made her way home by
slow stages to England, which she reached in safety on October the 2nd,
1836. What an ideal education for the future reconstructor of
biological science! He had now all his problems cut and dried, ready to
his hand, and he had nothing important left to do--except to sit down
quietly in his study, and proceed to solve them. Observation and
collection had given him one half the subject-matter of the 'Origin of
Species;' reflection and Malthus were to give him the other half. Never
had great mind a nobler chance; never, again, had noble chance a great
mind better adapted by nature and heredity to make the most of it. The
man was not wanting to the opportunity, nor was the opportunity wanting
to the man. Organism and environment fell together into perfect harmony;
and so, by a lucky combination of circumstances, the secret of the ages
was finally wrung from not unwilling nature by the far-seeing and
industrious volunteer naturalist of the 'Beagle' expedition.
It would be giving a very false idea of the interests which stirred
Charles Darwin's mind during his long five years' voyage, however, if we
were to dwell exclusively upon the biological side of his numerous
observations on that memorable cruise. Ethnology, geology, oceanic
phenomena, the height of the snow-line, the climate of the Antarctic
islands, the formation of icebergs, the transport of boulders, the
habits and manners engendered by slavery, all almost equally aroused in
their own way the young naturalist's vivid interest. Nowhere do we get
the faintest trace of narrow specialism; nowhere are we cramped within
the restricted horizon of the mere vulgar beetle-hunter and
butterfly-catcher. The biologist of the 'Beagle' had taken the whole
world of science for his special province. Darwin's mind with all its
vastness was not, indeed, profoundly analytical. The task of working out
the psychological and metaphysical aspects of evolution fell rather to
the great organising and systematising intellect of Herbert Spencer. But
within the realm of material fact, and of the widest possible inferences
based upon such fact, Darwin's keen and comprehensive spirit ranged
freely over the whole illimitable field of nature. 'No one,' says Buckle
with unwonted felicity, 'can have a firm grasp of any science if, by
confining himself to it, he shuts out the light of analogy. He may, no
doubt, work at the details of his subject; he may be useful in adding to
its facts; he will never be able to enlarge its philosophy. For the
philosophy of every department depends on its connection with other
departments, and must therefore be sought at their points of contact. It
must be looked for in the place where they touch and coalesce: it lies,
not in the centre of each science, but on the confines and margin.' This
profound truth Darwin fully and instinctively realised. It was the
all-embracing catholicity of his manifold interests that raised him into
the greatest pure biologist of all time, and that enabled him to
co-ordinate with such splendid results the raw data of so many distinct
and separate sciences. And even as early as the days of the cruise in
the 'Beagle,' that innate catholicity had already asserted itself in
full vigour. Now it is a party of Gauchos throwing the bola that engages
for the moment his eager attention; and now again it is a group of
shivering Fuegians, standing naked with their long hair streaming in the
wind on a snowy promontory of their barren coast. Here he examines the
tubular lightning-holes melted in the solid rock of Maldonado by the
electric energy; and there he observes the moving boulder-streams that
course like torrents down the rugged corries of the Falkland Islands. At
one time he works upon the unstudied geology of the South American
Pampas; at another, he inspects the now classical lagoon and narrow
fringing reef of the Keeling archipelago. Everywhere he sees whatever of
most noteworthy in animate or inanimate nature is there to be seen; and
everywhere he draws from it innumerable lessons, to be applied hereafter
to the special field of study upon which his intense and active energies
were finally concentrated. It is not too much to say, indeed, that it
was the voyage of the 'Beagle' which gave us in the last resort the
'Origin of Species' and its great fellow the 'Descent of Man.'
[1] The full narrative was first given to the world in 1839, some three
years after Darwin's return to England, so that much of it evidently
represents the results of his maturer thinking and reading on the facts
collected during his journey round the world.