CHARGE DARWIN.

Auckland Star, Volume XIX, Issue 100, 28 April 1888, Page 1 (Supplement)

CHARGE DARWIN.

Memoir of tho Great Evolutionist.

Ox the 19bh of April, 1882, the greatest naturalist of the present century passed away. He lived to re-create the biologica study. Long before the veteran of seventy three was entombed in Westminster Abbey' his name was familiar throughout the world. He has been chiefly known by his books ; now we shall understand something of the man. The autobiography, the letters, and the reminiscences of his son, and fellow-worker, Francis Darwin, give us the story of his youth and education, his account of the books he read and the friends he knew, a picture of the happy time in the secluded little Kent village of Down, and, by no moans the least valuable, Darwin's own modest estimate of his life and powers. Long is it since any biography of equal interest to the scientilic world has seen the day. It is full of light on a grand and generous character, and of encouragement to tho honest and persevering worker in every department of the world's economy. The man whose name will rank with those that have made epochs in the world's history was rather a failure till he was two-and twenty. His earliest recollections of himself extort the confession that as a little lad he was slower in learning than his younger sister Catherine, was in many ways a naughty boy, and much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods ; as, for example, he say 3: "I told another little boy—l believe it was Loighton, who afterwards became a well-known lichenologist and botanist—that I could produce variously-coloured polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with certain coloured fluids, which was. of course, a monstrous fable, and had never been tried by me." He was eight years old when he lost his mother. Next year (1818) he was sent to Dr. Butler's great school in his native town of Shrewsbury. Nothing could have been worse for the development of his mind, he considers, than the seven years spent there. The education being strictly classical, it was, to one who during his whole life was "singularly incapable of mastering any language, simply a blank." How clear a picture does it convey of the narrow-mindedness of great school-masters half a century ago to learn that Dr. Butler publicly rebuked the greatest pupil he ever had for wasting his time on such useless subjects as chemical experiments, for which taste for real knowledge his schoolmates gave him the nickname of " Gas," and the master called him "a poco curanfce," or careless, negligent fellow. At sixteen his disappointed father ent him to Edinburgh University _to enable him to follow his own profession, that of a doctor. Young Darwin had become convinced from various little indications that his father would leave him property enough to subsist on in comfort, " though," he adds, in his own recollections, " I novcr imagined I should be so rich a man as I am;" and, secondly, he was not urged to practise dissection,, and thus never overcame his innate . horror at the sight of blood, which remained with him to tho end of his days. "On two occasions," [he writes, "I attended the operating theatre in the hospital at Edinburgh, and saw two very bad operations, one on a child ; but I rushed away before they were completed. Nor did I ever attend again, for hardly any inducement would have been strong enough to make me do so, this being long before the blessed days of chloroform. Those two cases fairly haunted me for many a long i year." Thus, not a classic, disgusted with the very notion of being a doctor, there was seemingly only one profession leffe —to become a clergyman. Some little doubt existed at first as to belief in all the dogmas of the Church of England, but otherwise he rather liked the suggestion of being a country parson. Accordingly he writes: I read with care " Pearson on the Creede " and a few other books on divinity; and. as I did not then in the least doubt the stnoi; and literal truth of every word in the Bible, I soon

persuaded myself that our creed must be accepted. Considering how fiercely I have been . attacked by_ the orthoaox, it seems ludicrous ' that I once intended to be a clergyman. If tho phrenologists are to bo trusted, I was well fitted in one respect to be a clergyman. A few years ago the secretaries of a German Psychological Society asked mo earnestly by letter'for a photo- ' graph. o£ myself, and some time afterwards I received a report or one of the meetings, in ' which it seemed that the shape of my head had . been tho subject of public discussion, and one of the speakers declared that I had the bump of : reverence developed enough for ten priests. i Academically the three years at Cam- • bridge were worse than wasted—so Darwin thought. Euclid he appreciated, but mathematics generally he failed to understand, deeply to his regret afterwards, "For men so endowed seem to have an extra sense." He managed to avoid a miserable failure in classics, and so passed in the public examinations without any dis- ■ tinction. Worse than all this, he says': ' From my passion for shooting and for hunt- ' ing, and, when this failed, for riding across ■ country, I got into a sporting set, including • some dissipated, low-minded young men. We ÜBcd often to dire together'in the evening, though these dinners often included men of a ; higher stamp, and we sometimes drank too : much, with jolly singing and playing at cards afterwards. I know I ought to fee) ashamed of days and evenings thus spent, but as some of my friends were very pleasant, and we were all In the highest spirits, I cannot help looking back to those times with much pleasure. I also got into a musical set. . . . and! sometimes hired the chorister boys to sing inmyrcoas. Nevertheless, I am so utterly destitute of an ■ ear that I cannot perceive a discord or keen time or hum a tuno correctly, and it is a mystery to mo how I could possibly have derived pleasure from music. It was tastes like these which led Dr Darwin to fear that his son would become " an idle sporting man," and to tell him in ; words that produced a feeling of deep mortification at the time: "You care for ' nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catch- • ingl; and you will be a disgrace to yourself i and all your family." Unjust estimate! ! The father, whom Darwin never ceased to ; love and revere, lived to see his son on the | high road to a distinction far beyond that i which even his grandfather Erasmus, poet and naturalist, had achieved, or even j dreamt of. "lam thankful," the son re- ] cords, "to say that I became a prime i favourite with him." ' Now came the evolution of the evolu- \ tionist. Darwin, like all the greatest ] minds - like Homer, Shakspere, Newton, Herschel, Stephenson and hundreds more —-had been educating himself. There was \ one man at Cambridge who saw this; it 1 was Professor Honslovv, the teacher of ' botany. Honslow discovered Darwin ; he j took him on botanising excursions, and in- ( troduced him to Sedgwick, the geologist. 1 The naturalist's real education began when J he was very young, when he " took to col- j lecting all sorts of things—shells, seals, 1 franks, coins, minerals." l At Cambridge (he writes) nothing gave me so \ much pleasure as collecting booties. I will < give a proof of my zeal. One day, on tearing i off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and ] seized one in each hand; then I saw a third s and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, i so I popped the one which I held in my right ) hand into my mouth. Alas! it ejected some < intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue, \ so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, j which was lost, as was the third one. i " There is something in that young man \ that interests me," said Sir James Mac- \ kintosh when he met Darwin at Edinburgh, j It was this beetle-catcher who afterwards 1 spent eight years on tho " Cirripedes " and ' twenty yeara on the " Origin of Species," < and many more on " Orchids " and " Earth- 1 worms." To Henslow belongs the merit of ( recognising in the man who never j

" mastered any language," did not undertan d the higher mathematics, would not be a doctor, and was hardly fitted to be a clergyman, such faculties and aptitudes that when the professor was invited to recommend a naturalist to accompany the surveying expedition in her Majesty's ship Beagle on her voyage round the globe he at once named the beetle-catcher, " Not as a finished naturalist, but as amply qualified for collecting, observing-, inatural history. The story of that voyage is told in the most; popular and charming of Darwin's books. Talents which narrowminded pedagogues could not see in the young student were patent to all the world when the " Voyage of the Beagle" appeared. I was an " open-sesame "to the best men in the scientific world and to society. From 1836 to 1842 Darwin lived in London, having, in 1539, married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, and grand-daughter of the founder of the celebrated Etruria Works. In 1842 they removed to Down, in Kent. He met in society, among others, Sir John Her?cbel, Murchison, Buckle, Hnmboldt, Sydney Smith, Dean Milman, Lord Stanhope, Babbage, Macaulay, Carlyie, Grote, and others. For Herschel he felt a high reverence, was a little disappointed with Humboldt, and greatly diverted by Sydney Smith, of whom he observes : " There was something inexplicably amusing in every word he uttered." Macaulay lie admired so warmly that he says such a man could not talk too much as long as he allowed others to turn the stream of his conversation, and this Macualay did. Of men who did talk too exclusively he mentions, in a genial way, Buckle and Cai'lyle. Of these he writes : Buckle was a great talker. I listened to him, saying hardly a word, nor, indeed, could I have done so, for he left no saps. When Mrs Farrer began to sing. I jumped up and said, "I must listen to her;" he then turned round to a Mend and said, "Well,Mr Darwin's books are much better than his conversation." .... I remember a funny dinner "at my brother's (Egasm's Darwin's) where, among a few othcra wore Babbage), and Lyell, both of whom liked to talk. Carlyie, however, silenced every one by haranguing; during the whole dinner on the advantages of silence. After dinner, Babbagc, in the grimmest manner, thanked Carlyie for his very interesting lecture on silence.

Darwin's most intimate personal friends —correspondence with whom occupies much of these volumes —were Lyell, Hooker, and Huxley. To scientific men the correspondence in these volumes will be of deep, interest, on account of its gradual unfolding of the law of natural selection in Darwin's mind. There is one feature in it which ought to escape no reader —the magnanimous friendship it displays between Darwin and Mr A. R. Wallace, who independently arrived ab the same conclusions. Their papers on the subject were simultaneously laid before the Linnaian Society, and yet they were never jealous of each other. Darwin exalts the "generous and noble disposition" of his friend, and Wallace defend "Darwin in every direction. One other iiii.i had partly anticipated the origin of species, Mr Herbert Spenceri to whom we owe the phrase, " Survival of the fittest," and with whom, from 1852, Darwin maintained the warmest friendship. In a letter to Hay Lankester he says :"I suspect that hereafter he (Spencer) will be looked upon as by far the greatest living philosopher in England ; and, perhaps, equal to any that have lived." Darwin's natural generosity led him to see what was best and noblest in his fellows ; and this is all the more remarkable, considering that, to use the words of Francis Darwin —very gracefully recording the devotion of his mother: For nearly forty years he never knew of one day of the health of ordinary mon; and thus bis life was one struggle against the weariness and strain of sickness No one except my mother knows the full amount of suffering he endured, orofhis wonderful patience. In all the latter years of his life she never left, him for a night, and her days were so planned that all his resting hours might be shared with her. She shielded him from every annoyance, and omitted nothing that might save him from trouble, or prevent him becoming: overtired, or that might alleviate the many discomforts of his ill-health In his relationship towards my mother his tender and sympathetic nature was shown in its most beautiful aspect. In her presence he found his happiness, and through her his life—which might have been overshadowed by gloom—became one of content and quiet gladnes3. It has been assumed that this ill-health was due to the sea-sickness from which the naturalist of the Beagle suffered during his voyage round the globe; but the sufferer himself ascribed it to the hereditary "fault" which came out as gout

in some of his ancestors. The editor appears to think that the extent to which his father suffered from sea-sickness has been a good deal exaggerated. Despito his sufferings, scarcely children or servant could ei'er remember an ebullition of illtemper on the part of the great naturalist. The tedium produced by so much ill-health ' was partly relieved by novel reading. All sorts of novels were read to him, the one condition he insisted on being that they should end happily; jocosely he added that he would have a law to prevent people making their stories end miserably. "A novel, to be a good one," lie observes, " must have some character that one can ■ love ; and if this character should be a pretty woman, so much the better." Another recreation at Down was backgammon, two games of which he played every night with Mrs Darwin. Curiously enough, he was a constant peruser of the Parliamentary debates. The reading ■ which troubled him most was " the verdammte German," as he used to call it; \ and he was indignant with the Germans for not all writing like Dr. F. Hildebrand, whose work was as clear as French. When Darwin began to learn the language, he boasted of it to Sir J. Hooker, who replied, "Ah, my dear fellow, that's nothing ; I've begun it many times." A great number of people wrote to Darwin to inquire about his religious beliefs. \ In answer to a German youth who, after receiving one reply that the theory of evo- : lution -vas quite compatible with the belief \ in a God, was not satisfied and wanted : more light, the following response was sent : I am much engaged, an old man and out of health, and I cannot spare time to answer all \ your questions fully. Nor, indeed, can they bo ' answered. Science has nothing to do with j Christ, except in so far as the habit of research ■ makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. For myself I do not believe that there lias ever ■ been any revelation. Asfor a future life, every j man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities. Beginning, as we have seen, in a belief \ in the literal truth of every word in the Bible, the scientist "gradually came, be- j tween 1836 and 1839, to see that the Old j Testament was no more to be trusted than"' the sacred books of the Hindoos." In 1876 ' he wrote: By fu ith or reflecting that clearer evidence would be requisite to make any sane i man believe in the miracles by which Chris-1 tianlty is supported, tincl that the more we; know of the fixed laws of nature the more in-^ credible do miracles become; that the men at' that time were ignorant and credulous to a; degree almost incomprehensible by us; that's tho Gospels cannot be proved to have been.) written simultaneously with the events; that* they differ in many important details, far too* important, as it seems to me, to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye-witnesses; by j such reflections as these, which I give notaaj having the least novelty or value as they in- ] fluenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve intj Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact; that many false religions have spread over', large portions of the earth like wildfire had some weight with me. But I was very unwilling to give up my belief. . . . This dis-; belief crept over me at a very slow rate, but;.; was at last complete. The rate was so slow ! that I felt no distress. . . With respect to,; immortality . . . believing as Ido that man,] in the distant future will be a far more perfect ■ creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient j beings are doomed to complete annihilation; after such long-continued slow progress. To j those who fully admit the immortality of. the soul the destruction of our world will,] not appear so dreadful. Another source of ] conviction in the existence of God follows from! the extreme difficulty, or rather impossibility.: of conceiving this immense and wonderful" universe—including man, with his capacity of , looking far backwards and into futurity—as ■ the result of blind chance or necessity. When.' thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a.; First Cause having an intelligent mind, in.i some degree analogous to that of man, and I; deserve to be called a Theist. The conclusion,! was strong in my mind about the time, as far as' lean remember, when I wrote the "Origin o£i Species," and it is since that time that it has, f very gradually, with many fluctuations, be-' come weaker. But then arises the doubt, can' the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe,,! been developed from a mind as low as that; possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted.*' when it draws such grand conclusions? I can-: not pretend to throw tho least light on such.; abstruse problems. The mystery of the begin- j ning of all things is insoluble by us, and I, for. one, must be content to remain an Agnostic. ;

On April 18, 1882, the clay before his.' decease, Darwin recognised that his end) was near, and said, " I am not the least) i afraid to die." Only on the previous day j he had recorded for his son an experiment!' in which the latter was engaged. We will! follow Mr Francis Darwin's example in! closing the record of his father's life with a i few words which were added to the manu-| script of the latter's autobiography in I 1879:

As for myself, I believe that I have acted i rightly in steadily following and devoting.my j life to science. I feel no remorse from having.] committed any great sin, but have often and*] often regretted that I have not done more • direct good to my fellow creatures.