Galton’s yet more famous cousin, Charles Darwin, presents in equal purity the lover and the artist in the sphere of Nature and Science. No doubt there were once many obtuse persons to whom these names seemed scarcely to fit when applied to Darwin. There have been people to whom Darwin scarcely seemed a man of genius, merely a dry laborious pedestrian student of facts. He himself even—as many people find it difficult to forget—once lamented his indifference to poetry and art. But Darwin was one of those elect persons in whose subconscious, if not in their conscious, nature is implanted the realisation that “science _is_ poetry,” and in a field altogether remote from the poetry and art of convention he was alike poet and artist. Only a man so endowed could from a suggestion received on reading Malthus have conceived of natural selection as a chief moulding creative force of an infinite succession of living forms; so also of his fantastic theory of pangenesis. Even in trifling matters of experiment, such as setting a musician to play the bassoon in his greenhouse, to ascertain whether music affected plants, he had all the inventive imagination of poet or of artist. He was poet and artist—though I doubt if this has been pointed out—in his whole attitude towards Nature. He worked hard, but to him work was a kind of play, and it may well be that with his fragile health he could not have carried on his work if it had not been play. Again and again in his “Life and Letters” we find the description of his observations or experiments introduced by some such phrase as: “I was infinitely amused.” And he remarks of a biological problem that it was like a game of chess. I doubt, indeed, whether any great man of science was more of an artist than Darwin, more consciously aware that he was playing with the world, more deliciously thrilled by the fun of life. That man may well have found “poetry and art” dull who himself had created the theory of sexual selection which made the whole becoming of life art and the secret of it poetry.[49]