Oliver Wendell Holmes, born in the same year, delighted to speak of the good company in which he came into the world. On January 27th, 1894, I had the great pleasure of sitting next to him at a dinner of the Saturday Club in Boston, and he then spoke of the subject with the same enthusiasm with which he deals with it in his writings; mentioning the four distinguished names, and giving a brief epigrammatic description of each with characteristic felicity. Dr. Holmes further said that he remembered with much satisfaction an occasion on which he was able to correct Darwin on a matter of scientific fact. He could not remember the details, but we may hope for their ultimate recovery, for he said that Darwin had written a courteous reply accepting the correction. [Sidenote: HIS FAMILY.] Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), was a man of great genius. He speculated upon the origin of species, and arrived at views which were afterwards independently enunciated by Lamarck. He resembled this great zoologist in fertility of imagination, and also in the boldness with which he put forward suggestions, many of which were crude and entirely untested by an appeal to facts. The poetical form in which a part of his work was written was, doubtless, largely due to the traditions and customs of the age in which he lived. Robert Waring (1766–1848), the father of Charles Darwin, was the second son of Erasmus. He married a daughter of the great Josiah Wedgwood. Although his mother died when he was only eight years old, and Darwin remembered very little of her, there is evidence that she directed his attention to Nature (“Autobiography,” p. 28, footnote). Dr. Darwin followed his father’s profession, commencing a very successful medical practice at Shrewsbury before he was twenty-one. He was a man of great penetration, especially in the discernment of character--a power which was of the utmost value to him in his profession. Dr. Darwin had two sons and four daughters: Charles was the younger son and fourth child, his brother Erasmus being the third. Even in this mere outline there is evidence of hereditary genius in the Darwin family--evidence which becomes irresistible when all available details of every member of the family are brought together, as they are in the great “Life and Letters.” When it is further remembered that two of Charles Darwin’s sons have achieved distinction as scientific investigators, it will be admitted that the history of the family affords a most striking example of hereditary intellectual power.