odified and unassisted
natural selection is not to-day considered by most scientists a
sufficient agent for producing evolution. But everyone connected with
the subject acknowledges Darwin as the master, and says that it was
his work which converted the world to a belief in evolution. We can
have no better preparation for an intelligent understanding of this
subject than to consider carefully the life of this remarkable man and
the circumstances under which he came to his epoch-making conclusions.

Evolution has taught us to attempt as far as may be to account for man
on the basis of his heredity or of his environment. It is interesting
to note that both of these factors in Darwin's case were entirely
favorable. In the latter part of the eighteenth century Erasmus Darwin
had given to the world an astonishing poem in which he anticipated not
a little of the thought which his more famous grandson was to make so
widely known. Josiah Wedgwood had learned to make for England her most
famous pottery, no quality of which was more widely recognized than
the sterling patience with which it was made. Erasmus Darwin, with his
scientific proclivities, and Josiah Wedgwood, with his sturdy common
sense and patient workmanship, united to give Charles Darwin his
inherited tastes, for he was a grandson of both. Born in 1809, on the
banks of the Severn in England, Charles Darwin was the delicate son of
a practicing physician of modest but sufficient means. Owing to his
lack of early vigor, Darwin spent much time in the open air, and in
his excursions about his home was chiefly interested in collecting
beetles. This taste, which lasted through all his young manhood, is
the one early indication of the traits that were later to develop. At
first in the day-school and later in the preparatory school Charles
Darwin was anything but a satisfactory student. Even a kindly desire
later to make the most of him makes it impossible to find traces of
any especial fondness for earnest study. He himself believed his
education to have been nearly useless, although he doubtless
under-estimated its value. At the age of sixteen he went to Edinburgh
at his father's desire, to study medicine. The sight of the
dissecting-room nauseated him completely, and he refused to continue
working in it. Later an operation which he witnessed in a clinic at
the hospital sickened him so thoroughly that he declined to attend
further operations. It became evident that the yo