Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11
General
Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11
Literature -- Collections
may with the lips deny the Bible and its work; but humanity can never
deny it in its heart, without the sacrifice of the best that it
contains, faith in unity and hope for justice, and without a relapse
into the mythology and the "might makes right" of thirty centuries ago.
CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN
(1809-1882)
BY E. RAY LANKESTER
[Illustration: CHAS. R. DARWIN]
Charles Robert Darwin, the great naturalist and author of the "Darwinian
theory," was the son of Dr. Robert Waring Darwin (1766-1848) and
grandson of Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). He was born at Shrewsbury on
February 12th, 1809. W. E. Gladstone, Alfred Tennyson, and Abraham
Lincoln were born in the same year. Charles Darwin was the youngest of a
family of four, having an elder brother and two sisters. He was sent to
a day school at Shrewsbury in the year of his mother's death, 1817. At
this age he tells us that the passion for "collecting" which leads a man
to be a systematic naturalist, a virtuoso, or a miser, was very strong
in him, and was clearly innate, as none of his brothers or sisters had
this taste. A year later he was removed to the Shrewsbury grammar
school, where he profited little by the education in the dead languages
administered, and incurred (as even to-day would be the case in English
schools) the rebukes of the head-master Butler for "wasting his time"
upon such unprofitable subjects as natural history and chemistry, which
he pursued "out of school."
When Charles was sixteen his father sent him to Edinburgh to study
medicine, but after two sessions there he was removed and sent to
Cambridge (1828) with the intention that he should become a clergyman.
In 1831 he took his B. A. degree as what is called a "pass-man." In
those days the injurious system of competitive examinations had not laid
hold of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge as it has since, and
Darwin quietly took a pass degree whilst studying a variety of subjects
of interest to him, without a thought of excelling in an examination. He
was fond of all field sports, of dogs and horses, and also spent much
time in excursions, collecting and observing with Henslow the professor
of botany, and Sedgwick the celebrated geologist. An undergraduate
friend of those days has declared that "he was the most genial,
warm-hearted, generous and affectionate of friends; his sympathies were
with all that was good and true; he had a cordial hatred for everything
false, or vile, or cruel, or mean, or dishonorable. He was not only
great but pre-eminently good, and just and lovable."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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