allow the jelly to form a thin coating over the under side of the cork. Half a litre of air was then drawn through each flask at the rate of 1 litre in three minutes. The samples were collected as before, except that the dust raised was not nearly so great. After nine days, the following number of colonies had developed on the jelly in the flasks, but not a single one was observed on the under side of the cork:

The above results show, therefore, that, with an aspiration of 1 litre of air in three minutes, all the organisms are deposited on the jelly at the bottom of the flask, and that none reach the cork or exit tube. This result is probably due not only to the action of gravity, but also to the initial velocity, with which the organisms leave the mouth of the entrance tube and enter the flask, being such as to project them on to the surface of the jelly at the bottom of the flask, where they stick and have not the chance of rising again.

OBITUARY NOTICES OF FELLOWS DECEASED.

CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN was the fifth child and second son of Robert Waring Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood, and was born on the 12th February, 1809, at Shrewsbury, where his father was a physician in large practice.

Mrs. Robert Darwin died when her son Charles was only eight years old, and he hardly remembered her. A daughter of the famous Josiah Wedgwood, who created a new branch of the potter's art, and established the great works of Etruria, could hardly fail to transmit important mental and moral qualities to her children; and there is a solitary record of her direct influence in the story told by a schoolfellow, who remembers Charles Darwin "bringing a flower to school, and saying that his mother had taught him how, by looking at the inside of the blossom, the name of the plant could be discovered." (I, p. 28.*)

The theory that men of genius derive their qualities from their mothers, however, can hardly derive support from Charles Darwin's case, in the face of the patent influence of his paternal forefathers. Dr. Darwin, indeed, though a man of marked individuality of character, a quick and acute observer, with much practical sagacity, is said not to have had a scientific mind. But when his son adds that his father "formed a theory for almost everything that occurred " (I, p. 20), he indicates a highly probable source for that inability to refrain from forming an hypothesis on every subject which he confesses to be one of the leading characteristics of his own mind, some pages further on (I, p. 103). Dr. R. W. Darwin, again, was the third son of Erasmus Darwin, also a physician of great repute, who shared the intimacy of Watt and Priestley, and was widely known as the author of 'Zoonomia,' and other voluminous poetical and prose works which had a great vogue in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The celebrity which they enjoyed was in part due to the attractive style (at least according to the taste of that day) in which the author's extensive, though not very profound, acquaintance with natural phenomena was set forth; but in a still greater degree, probably, to the boldness of the speculative views, always ingenious and sometimes fantastic, in which he indulged. The conception of evolution set afoot by De Maillet and others, in the early part of the century, not only found a vigorous champion in

* The references throughout this notice are to the 'Life and Letters,' unless the contrary is expressly stated.

VOL. XLIV.

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Erasmus Darwin; but he propounded an hypothesis as to the manner in which the species of animals and plants have acquired their characters, which is identical in principle with that subsequently rendered famous by Lamarck.

6

That Charles Darwin's chief intellectual inheritance came to him from the paternal side then, is hardly doubtful. But there is nothing to show that he was, to any sensible extent, directly influenced by his grandfather's biological work. He tells us that a perusal of the Zoonomia' in early life produced no effect upon him, although he greatly admired it—and that on reading it again, ten or fifteen years afterwards, he was much disappointed, "the proportion of speculation being so large to the facts given." But with his usual anxious candour he adds, "Nevertheless, it is probable that the hearing, rather early in life, such views maintained and praised, may have favoured my upholding them, in a different form, in my 'Origin of Species.'" (I, p. 38.) Erasmus Darwin was in fact an anticipator of Lamarck, and not of Charles Darwin; there is no trace in his works of the conceptions by the addition of which his grandson metamorphosed the theory of evolution as applied to living things and gave it a new foundation.

Charles Darwin's childhood and youth afforded no intimation that he would be, or do, anything out of the common run. In fact, the prognostications of the educational authorities into whose hands he first fell, were most distinctly unfavourable; and they counted the only boy of original genius who is known to have come under their hands as no better than a dunce. The history of the educational experiments to which Darwin was subjected is curious, and not without a moral for the present generation. There were four of them, and three were failures. Yet it cannot be said that the materials on which the pedagogic powers operated were other than good. In his boyhood, Darwin was strong, well-grown, and active, taking the keen delight in field sports and in every description of hard physical exercise which is natural to an English country-bred lad; and, in respect of things of the mind, he was neither apathetic, nor idle, nor one-sided. The 'Autobiography' tells us that he "had much zeal for whatever interested" him, and he was interested in many and very diverse topics. He could work hard, and liked a complex subject better than an easy one. The "clear geometrical proofs " of Euclid delighted him. His interest in practical chemistry, carried out in an extemporised laboratory, in which he was permitted to assist by his elder brother, kept him late at work, and earned him the nickname of "gas" among his schoolfellows. And there could have been no insensibility to literature in one who, as a boy, could sit for hours reading Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, and Byron; who greatly admired some of the Odes of Horace; and who, in later years, on board the

"Beagle," when only one book could be carried on an expedition, chose a volume of Milton for his companion.

Industry, intellectual interests, the capacity for taking pleasure in deductive reasoning, in observation, in experiment, no less than in the highest works of imagination: where these qualities are present any rational system of education should surely be able to make something of them. Unfortunately for Darwin, the Shrewsbury Grammar School, though good of its kind, was an institution of a type universally prevalent in this country half a century ago, and by no means extinct at the present day. The education given was " strictly classical," " especial attention" being "paid to verse-making," while all other subjects, except a little ancient geography and history, were ignored. Whether, as in some famous English schools at that date and much later, elementary arithmetic was also left out of sight does not appear; but the instruction in Euclid which gave Charles Darwin so much satisfaction was certainly supplied by a private tutor. That a boy, even in his leisure hours, should permit himself to be interested in any but book-learning seems to have been regarded as little better than an outrage by the head master, who thought it his duty to administer a public rebuke to young Darwin for wasting his time on such a contemptible subject as chemistry. English composition and literature, modern languages, modern history, modern geography, appear to have been considered to be as despicable as chemistry.

For seven long years, Darwin got through his appointed tasks; construed without cribs, learned by rote whatever was demanded, and concocted his verses in approved schoolboy fashion. And the result, as it appeared to his mature judgment, was simply negative. "The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank." (I, p. 32.) On the other hand, the extraneous chemical exercises, which the head master treated so contumeliously, are gratefully spoken of as the "best part of his education while at school. Such is the judgment of the scholar on the school; as might be expected, it has its counterpart in the judgment of the school on the scholar. The collective intelligence of the staff of Shrewsbury School could find nothing but dull mediocrity in Charles Darwin. The mind. that found satisfaction in knowledge, but very little in mere learning, that could appreciate literature, but had no particular aptitude for grammatical exercises, appeared to the "strictly classical" pedagogue to be no mind at all. As a matter of fact, Darwin's school education left him ignorant of almost all the things which it would have been well for him to know, and untrained in all the things it would have been useful for him to be able to do, in after life. Drawing, practice in English composition, and instruction in the elements of the physical sciences, would not only have been infinitely valuable to him in reference to his future career, but would have furnished

the discipline suited to his faculties, whatever that career might be. And a knowledge of French and German, especially the latter, would have removed from his path obstacles which he never fully

overcame.

Thus, starved and stunted on the intellectual side, it is not surprising that Charles Darwin's energies were directed towards athletic amusements and sport, to such an extent, that even his kind and sagacious father could be exasperated into telling him that "he cared for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching." (I, p. 32.) It would be unfair to expect even the wisest of fathers to have foreseen that the shooting and the rat-catching, as training in the ways of quick observation and in physical endurance, would prove more valuable than the construing and verse-making to his son, whose attempt, at a later period of his life, to persuade himself "that shooting was almost an intellectual employment: it required so much skill to judge where to find most game, and to hunt the dogs well" (I, p. 43), was by no means so sophistical as he seems to have been ready to admit.

In 1825, Dr. Darwin came to the very just conclusion that his son Charles would do no good by remaining at Shrewsbury School, and sent him to join his elder brother Erasmus, who was studying medicine at Edinburgh, with the intention that the younger son should also become a medical practitioner. Both sons, however, were well aware that their inheritance would relieve them from the urgency of the struggle for existence which most professional men have to face, and they seem to have allowed their tastes, rather than the medical curriculum, to have guided their studies. Erasmus Darwin was debarred by constant ill-health from seeking the public distinction which his high intelligence and extensive knowledge would, under ordinary circumstances, have insured. He took no great interest in biological subjects, but his companionship must have had its influence on his brother. Still more was exerted by friends like Coldstream and Grant, both subsequently well-known zoologists (and the latter an enthusiastic Lamarckian), by whom Darwin was induced to interest himself in marine zoology. A notice of the ciliated germs of Flustra, communicated to the Plinian Society in 1826, was the first fruits of Darwin's half century of scientic work. Occasional attendance at the Wernerian Society brought him into relation with that excellent ornithologist the elder Macgillivray, and enabled him to see and hear Audubon. Moreover, he got lessons in bird-stuffing from a negro, who had accompanied the eccentric traveller Waterton in his wanderings, before settling in Edinburgh.

No doubt Darwin picked up a great deal of valuable knowledge during his two years' residence in Scotland; but it is equally clear that next to none of it came through the regular channels of academic education. Indeed, the influence of the Edinburgh professoriate