Life of Charles DarwinBettany, G. T. (George Thomas)
Science
Life of Charles Darwin
Bettany, G. T. (George Thomas)
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882
A movement was at once set on foot for securing a worthy public memorial
of Darwin. Subscriptions flowed in abundantly, and came from all
countries of Europe, the United States, the British Colonies, and
Brazil. Sweden sent the astonishing number of 2296 subscriptions;
persons of all ranks contributed, from a bishop to a seamstress. Over
£4,000 in all was subscribed, and it was resolved, in the first place,
to procure the best possible statue. This work was entrusted to Mr.
Boehm, R.A., with admirable results. Permission was obtained to place it
in the great hall of the British Museum of Natural History, South
Kensington, and here it was unveiled on June 9, 1885, by the Prince of
Wales, who accepted the statue on behalf of the Trustees of the British
Museum from Professor Huxley as representing the subscribers. It is
agreed that the statue is excellent, the attitude easy and dignified,
the expression natural and characteristic. The only defect is that the
hands are unlike Darwin's. The balance, about £2,200, remaining over
from the fund, was given to the Royal Society to be invested for the
promotion of biological studies and researches.
The conditions under which Darwin lived were just those in which, as
_The Saturday Review_ put it, his sweet and gentle nature could blossom
into perfection. "Arrogance, irritability, and envy, the faults
that ordinarily beset men of genius, were not so much conquered as
non-existent in a singularly simple and generous mind. It never occurred
to him that it would be to his gain to show that he and not some one
else was the author of a discovery. If he was appealed to for help by a
fellow-worker, the thought never passed into his mind that he had
secrets to divulge which would lessen his importance. It was science,
not the fame of science, that he loved, and he helped science by the
temper in which he approached it. He had to say things which were
distasteful to a large portion of the public, but he won the ear even of
his most adverse critics by the manifest absence of a mere desire to
shine, by his modesty, and by his courtesy. He told honestly what he
thought to be the truth, but he told it without a wish to triumph or to
wound. There is an arrogance of unorthodoxy as well as an arrogance of
orthodoxy, and if ideas that a quarter of a century ago were regarded
with dread are now accepted without a pang, the rapidity of the change
of opinion, if not the change itself, is largely due to the fact that
the leading exponent of these ideas was the least arrogant of men."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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