isrepresented. 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 known him. Men
had ample material for judging of his work, and in the end had given
judgment with general acclaim. Of the man himself, however, they could
know but little, yet enough of his character shone forth in his work to
indicate its tenderness and goodness. Men instinctively felt him to be
in every way one of the great ones of the earth, whose removal from the
living world leaves mankind poorer in moral worth as well as in
intellect.

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 his son was
destined to fulfil. 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. 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, seals, franks, coins,
and minerals. The passion for collecting which leads a man to be a
systematic naturalist, a virtuoso, or a miser, was very strong in me,
and was clearly innate, as none of my sisters and brothers ever had this
taste."

* * * * *

Some of the incidents of his Cambridge life which he records are full of
interest in their bearing on his future career. Foremost among them
stands the friendship which he formed with Professor Henslow, whose
lectures on botany he attended. He joined in the class