Any formal life of Darwin should be written by a thoroughly trained and equipped scientist, and indeed no such life could be better than that written by Darwin’s son forty years ago. But one who, without special scientific qualifications, is profoundly interested in the characters and souls of men, all men, may perhaps be justified in making an intimate study of a man whose influence upon other men, for good and evil both, has been enormous, and who was himself one of the simplest, purest, noblest, most candid, most lovable, most Christian souls that ever lived. By an extraordinary coincidence Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England, on the same day, February 12, 1809, on which Abraham Lincoln was born in Hardin County, Kentucky. Darwin belonged to an excellent old English family on his father’s side and his mother was one of the Wedgwoods, of ceramic fame. His paternal grandfather, Erasmus, was a physician, a poet, and a scientist. Darwin’s father was an able and successful physician. He would have liked his son to be the same, but the son had not the taste for it. Failing medicine, the church was considered, but seemed equally unpromising. Education at Edinburgh and at Cambridge did not yield very much. In those days the classics were the basis and this boy had little interest in the classics. He liked field sports and outdoor life. Above all, he liked animals and plants, liked to observe and to describe them, and to record his observations, and this interest grew more and more absorbing. [Illustration: CHARLES DARWIN AS A CHILD With his sister Catherine] In 1831, at the age of twenty-two, Darwin obtained the position of naturalist on the government ship, Beagle, and for five years he was absent from England, exploring the southern hemisphere and carefully recording his observations on every sort of scientific subject, which were later published in his printed journal. Soon after his return home, he married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, a noble and charming woman, and a little later, in 1842, he settled at the small village of Down, in the county of Kent, and made his home there until his death in 1882. He inherited a considerable property, which was later increased from his books. He had a large family of sons and daughters, ten in all, and his life was half chronic invalidism and half intense devotion to scientific study and thought, or rather, the two elements were inextricably intertwined.