ments. For instance, the inhabitants of Otaheite, who, when first discovered, were governed by hereditary kings, had arrived at a far higher grade than another branch of the same people, the New Zealanders-who, although benefited by being compelled to turn their attention to agriculture, were republicans in the most absolute sense. In Tierra del Fuego, until some chief shall arise with power sufficient to secure any acquired advantage, such as the domesticated animals, it seems scarcely possible that the political state of the country can be improved. At present, even a piece of cloth given to one is torn into shreds and distributed; and no one individual becomes richer than another. On the other hand, it is difficult to understand how a chief can arise till there is property of some sort by which he might manifest his superiority and increase his power."

This is a most remarkable passage, pregnant absolutely with the ultimate political truth-never for a moment to be expected on the part of either of the boy combatants, whether Tory captain or Whig naturalist. Surely this passage, if it were seen, and understood, and taken to heart, of any public, how shallow soever-surely it would go far to bring more lustre and importance to Darwin in his existence than even the Origin of Species. Here, very specially, is the entire lesson for the present moment in which socialism, on the one hand, and a miscellaneous and unguaranteed democracy on the other, are assumed to be, for the society of the future, the only elements at all in question. It is sufficiently strange that we should see such vital ideas as these in the mere stripling Darwin, when the man Darwin, if not simply distracted by an hereditary bee in his bonnet, was wholly absorbed in at least a questionable theory, the interest of which lay entirely, to say so, in bugs and beetles, and not in his fellow-man at all. One wonders that any one who, in the first

instance, could for a moment, or even by chance, think such ideas as the stripling, or who could be so absorbed and engrossed as the man, in the second instance, should still be zealous and jealous to be known as a "Liberal or Radical," at the same time, too, that "his opinions on these matters" (politics) were without "any serious amount of thought." But we must remember that Mr. Darwin was an Englishman withal,-at bottom a stubborn, determined Englishman, -and quite capable of political gall, of hating a Tory, simply as a Tory, with his whole heart. Though never was father more indulgent with his children, and "it was delightful to draw for him," yet here, too, he was the man, and could take on the negative; "he always looked closely at the drawing," it is said, and "easily detected mistakes or carelessness." We have seen the deliberately firm front he always bore to his young captain also. Then, we may almost say there was no man he was softer to, or even flattered more, than Sir Charles Lyell; yet see how determinedly he speaks his mind to him when he thinks that he has reason to be offended. And such reason was all too clear to him when he found Lyell, after having, as it most certainly seemed, unmistakeably declared himself for evolution, suddenly shilly-shallying, in his Antiquity of Man, back again into the arms of the creationists. The letters on this subject (instructive, too, as to both Lyell and Darwin laying stress on, first, variation, and second, selection, as the two moments constitutive and exhaustive of the special, proper, and peculiar theory concerned) are very interesting, and occur iii. 7-21. He who reads them will see that Mr. Darwin by no means minces matters with Lyell; for all his habitual deference to him, he tells him his mind. This is admirable here, too, that Mr. Darwin does not express himself one whit stronger to Hooker than to

Lyell himself. There may be a certain biplicity of kindness and courtesy in Mr. Darwin; but there is no duplicity of his essential manhood and truth. With whatever delicacy of foliage, he is still the oak.

If without "any serious amount of thought," then, as his son says, Mr. Darwin was still so much one of his countrymen that he must be a party politician and firm. It coheres with the more philosophical political ideas on his part in the Journal that, at p. 295 of this book, when speaking of the Indians in the district of Cucao, on the west coast of Chiloe, we have, sympathetically, this from him: "These Indians end all their complaints by saying, And it is only because we are poor Indians, and know nothing; but it was not so when we had a king.'"

It belongs to the general consideration here also to notice that, with whatever grave intellectual views, there was in Darwin, in these days, a vein of humour as well. There are several passages in the Journal to prove this. I shall only mention the one, however, in the perusal of which I had actually to give vent to an irrepressible guffaw. It concerns an anecdote related by Mr. Darwin in reference to an amusing circumstance that occurred to him and his attendants when they were at a great height on the Andes. At the place where we slept," says Mr. Darwin, p. 324, "water necessarily boiled, from the diminished pressure of the atmosphere, at a lower temperature than it does in a less lofty country. Hence the potatoes, after remaining for some hours in the boiling water, were nearly as hard as ever. The pot was left on the fire all night, and next morning it was boiled again, but yet the potatoes were not cooked. I found out this by overhearing my two companions discussing the cause; they had come to the simple conclusion that the cursed pot (which was a new one) did not choose to boil potatoes.""

CHAPTER X.

CHARLES DARWIN-CONTINUED.

FROM the evidence of the Journal, then, it seems not unlikely that the young Darwin was a more concrete human being than the older, mature, illustrious Darwin when at last struck, as it were, into a single abstract thought,-Necessary variation of accident, taken advantage of and applied by nature to a new organic use, with the inevitable ultimate result of a new species.

That is, accurately, totally, and absolutely, the single, simple, one action postulated by Mr. Darwin for the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection.

That apart, however, the general character of Mr. Darwin, intellectual and other, must, in the course of this writing, have been gradually clearing itself for us. It takes the pouring on of chemicals to crisp into an image the nebula upon the plate. Natural history was, from the first and emphatically, his single bent, as it were his single vital stir, his one constitutive natural nisus. The term stir comes up here not unsignificantly; for it was stir that alone claimed his attention, stir that alone woke his single natural life. It may be said, indeed, that Charles Darwin's destiny in life was to watch physical movement -physical movement from the stir of an insect in the dust to the explosion of an earthquake all around. it was that he had no turn for languages. Observation

So

is an affair of the eyes-shallow, so far, and on the surface; but ideas, and their expression no less, spring rather from the depth-the cerebral depth-of the ears. The most magistral of bards have sung the griefs of the blind; but there are no poets of the deaf. The deaf cannot sing.

The stir of a beetle in the dust was the first stir that arrested the interest of a Darwin: the convulsion of a continent was possibly the last. Charles Darwin was a naturalist and a geologist; and he was-on the general level implied-nothing else. The evidence of this is ample,―discounting, that is, all that material, exceptional and by the way, which we have just signalised in the Journal. He certainly had a bad ear for vocal sounds.” This (i. 126) is the emphatic testimony of his own son. Mr. Darwin himself intimates once, a little latish in life (iii. 315): "The only approach to work which I can do is to look as it was then-"at tendrils and climbers." It was the "movements of plants" ("the job which I have in hand") constituted the stir which attracted his eyes at that moment (iii. 332). "This," he adds, " does not distress my weakened brain." "From my earliest youth," he says elsewhere, "I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed.” We have seen already how he was absorbed into his beetles; and we have heard it already that then, as a boy (i. 35), "he took much pleasure in watching birds." Despite his very genuine and deep-seated modesty, he can admit to his own credit this little (i. 103): “I think I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things my industry has been nearly as great as it could have been in the collection and observation of facts.” His first discovery, and his first scientific paper, concerned movement (i. 39): "I made one interesting little. discovery, and read a paper on the subject that the socalled ova of Flustra had the power of independent