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 primaeval 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 naïve 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 aesthetic 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 larvae 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 mégathérium
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 mégathérium,
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: ’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 Fe, 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.’