ched respectful forefingers to their caps and began
addressing the Volunteer as "Sir."

The "Beagle" sailed on December Twenty-seven, Eighteen Hundred
Thirty-one, and it was fully four years and ten months before Charles
Darwin saw England again. The trip decided the business of Darwin for
the rest of his life, and thereby an epoch was worked in the upward and
onward march of the race.

Captain Fitz-Roy of the British Navy was but twenty-three years old. He
was a draftsman, a geographer, a mathematician and a navigator. He had
sailed around the world as a plain tar, and taken his kicks and cuffs
with good grace. At the Portsmouth Naval School he had won a gold medal
for proficiency in study, and another medal had been given him for
heroism in leaping from a sailing-ship into the sea to save a drowning
sailor.

Let us be fair--the tight little island has produced men. To evolve
these few good men she may have produced many millions of the spawn of
earth, but let the fact stand--England has produced men. Here was a
beardless youth, slight in form, silent by habit, but so well thought of
by his Government that he was given charge of a ship, five officers, two
surgeons and forty-one picked men to go around the world and make
measurements of certain coral-reefs, and map the dangerous coasts of
Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.

The ship was provisioned for two years, but the orders were, "Do the
work, no matter how long it may take, and your drafts on the Government
will be honored."

Captain Fitz-Roy was a man of decision: he knew just where he wanted to
go, and what there was to do. He was to measure and map dreary wastes of
tossing tide, and to do the task so accurately that it would never have
to be done again: his maps were to remain forever a solace, a safety and
a security to the men who go down to the sea in ships.

England has certainly produced men--and Fitz-Roy was one of them.
Fitz-Roy is now known to us, not for his maps which have passed into the
mutual wealth of the world, but because he took on this trip, merely as
an afterthought, a volunteer naturalist.

Before the "Beagle" sailed, Captain Fitz-Roy and young Mr. Darwin went
down to Portsmouth, and the Captain showed him the ship. The Captain
took pains to explain the worst. It was to be at least two years of
close, unremitting toil. It was no pleasure-excursion--there were no
amusements provided, no cards, no wine on the table; the fare was to be
sim