amused themselves by making me pass an examination, which consisted of ascertaining how many tunes I could recognise, when they were played rather more quickly or slowly than usual; God save the King, when thus played, was a sore puzzle." Nevertheless, "from associating with those men and hearing them play, I acquired a strong taste for music." He acquired this strong taste for music-he, who was so utterly destitute of an ear that he "could not perceive a discord, or keep time and hum a tune correctly "-he, to whom it was "a mystery how he could possibly have derived pleasure from music!”

Whitley, he says again, " inoculated me with a taste. for pictures and good engravings, of which I bought some this taste, though not natural to me, lasted for several years."

As little, then, as it was natural" for him to take to pictures or music, just so little was it natural for him to take to the reading of books-even though he did so for hours! Why he did so, the reason of it, was simply this: He was the exemplarily good young man that, as he was taught or impressed, held self-improvement to be the one great duty. It was right to know pictures—it was right to know music-it was right to know literature. It was such knowledge alone that, as it were, got good marks, and was the badge of what was reputable. Music, painting, poetry, each, if to be known, required effort certainly force upon oneself; but tenacity might realise every one of them. One's place ordered as much. He was his celebrated grandfather's grandson, -noblesse oblige, and he would persevere. All this very much without actual consciousness. As for beetles, again, that was different it was natural" to take to them.

"No pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness, or gave me so much pleasure, as collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them, and rarely

compared their external characters with published descriptions, but got them named anyhow. What an indelible impression many of them have left on my mind! I can remember the exact appearance of certain posts, old trees, and banks where I made a good capture. -I am reminded of my old days by my third boy having just begun collecting beetles, and he caught the other day Brachinus crepitans— my blood boiled with old ardour when he caught a Licinus, a prize unknown to me-I feel like an old war-horse at the sound of the trumpet when I read about the capturing of rare beetles,-it makes me long to begin collecting again. (Life, etc., i. 50; ii. 36, 140, 141; iii. 335.)

His friend Herbert cannot go to Barmouth, but he must be written to urgently to search for, find, and send on quite a host of beetles: the violet-black, the large smooth black, the long smooth jet-black, the small pinkish, the yellowish transparent, the bluish metalliccoloured dung-beetle, etc. etc. Even on the voyage, to the Naturalist of the Beagle, beetles were of absorbing interest. At Bahia, as the Journal tells us, he had amused himself with observing the springing powers of the Pyrophorus luminosus; and from Rio he writes rapturously to Henslow of Hydroporus, Hygrotus, Hydrobius, Pselophus, Staphylinus, Curculio, as to Fox of Noterus, Colymbetes, Hydrophilus, Gromius, but asking the latter, almost pathetically, “Do you think any such will ever give me so much pleasure as our old friend crux major? And so it continues all through the voyage. At sea, in Patagonia, on the Andes, Keeling Island, Tierra del Fuego, the Galapagos, St. Helena, it is always beetles that are largely his interest. A propos of this last island, a long and peculiar footnote occurs in the Journal (p. 490), and is good to read. The stercovora are "beetles which find support in the matter which has already contributed towards the life of other and larger animals;" and Mr. Darwin is much exercised in mind on a problem suggested by the differences of them as in Europe, St.

Helena, La Plata, and Van Diemen's Land. If aborigines, it is "a difficult point to ascertain on what food they formerly subsisted" in St. Helena, where there had been no quadrupeds till only very recently. And he had been struck, it seems, with a similar difficulty in Van Diemen's Land. In Europe these beetles are "confined in their appetites," each of them keeping to its own quadruped and repugning the rest. Must it be supposed that the Van Diemen's Land beetles, losing the kangaroo, had taken to the cow, although it "had been then introduced only thirty-three years"? Mr. Darwin finds this apparent change of habits "highly remarkable; " and he plainly thinks it a pity that there should be so few insects of the sort, and that, consequently, such a quantity of good food should be "lost" in La Plata, "where, from the vast number of cattle and horses, the fine plains of turf are richly manured." So "I imagined," says Mr. Darwin, "I saw in this an instance where man had disturbed that chain, by which so many animals are linked together." The special stercovora of which he speaks are named Aphodius, Orgetes, Phanæus, etc., and the note is concluded by the acknowledgment, "I am indebted to the Rev. F. W. Hope, who, I hope, will permit me to call him my master in Entomology, for giving me the names of the foregoing insects."

It occurs to one here that it is remarkable how everything seems to have remained unchanged with a mere dung-beetle during all these twenty-two hundred years that separate Aristotle from Darwin. The latter tells here of a Phanæus that" buries the dung of the cattle in large earthen balls beneath the ground;" and the former speaks of a Cantharus that rolls up the dung in which it buries itself during the winter. In both, doubtless, it is the same insect that bears elsewhere, from the habit in question, the name of Pilularius.

Even many years after his voyage, as when he speaks of his son, Mr. Darwin is seen to be as enthusiastic in regard to beetles as ever he was; and two years later than that he cannot help writing to his friend Hooker, when he hears that the latter is going to Palestine: "If you go to the top of Lebanon, you ought to collect any beetles under stones there." Later still, in 1869 (iii. 114), he envies Mr. Wallace his capture of butterflies, and exclaims to him, "Certainly collecting is the best sport in the world."

«

I think we shall now, then, be pretty well at home with Mr. Darwin's pursuit of beetles, and how it must have distracted his studies otherwise at Cambridge. He might force himself to gulp music, painting, and poetry; but beetles ran in his blood. And so, all things considered, it is further quite evident that the peculiar staple of Cambridge University could not have proved very inviting to him. He was unable to see any meaning in the early steps in Algebra;" and, as a whole, mathematics just "repugned" him. With respect to Classics, he did nothing except attend a few compulsory college-lectures. His tenacity, diligence, and intelligence being roused, however, served him in good stead when he had to get up work to pass his various examinations, the Little-go, for example, "which he did easily." For his B.A. degree, his preparation, he says himself, "was done in a thorough manner, and so by answering well the examination questions in Paley, by doing Euclid well, and by not failing miserably in Classics, I gained a good place among of Toxoί or crowd of men who do not go in for honours."

That, then, is the record of his studies, indoor or outdoor, at Cambridge. He seems, for some time at first,riding, shooting, hunting, driving, drinking, card-playing, -to have got into "a sporting set, including some

us,

dissipated low-minded young men." But he, evidently, very soon forsook it. His son, Mr. Francis Darwin, tells "I remember, in my innocence as a small boy, asking him if he had ever been tipsy; and he answered very gravely that he was ashamed to say he had once drunk too much at Cambridge: may we not make bold to regard that one occasion as the occasion also of his rupture with "the sporting set"?

That brief excitement over, Charles Darwin approved himself at Cambridge, as the steady, well-regulated young man he had always been everywhere else. As at Edinburgh, so here, he associated only with such respectable young men as every respectable young man always should associate with. His daily companions, besides Fox, the enthusiastic entomologist, were, as they were eventually designated, H. Thompson, M.P., Railway Chairman, leading agriculturist; Albert Way, "the well-known archæologist;" Whitley, Canon of Durham; Herbert, County Court Judge at Cardiff; Heaviside, Canon of Norwich; Cameron, Vicar of Shoreham; Blane, who held a high post during the Crimean War; Lowe, brother of Lord Sherbrooke; Watkins, Archdeacon of York; Dawes, Dean of Hereford; Eyton of Eyton; Ramsay, brother of Sir Alexander Ramsay; Wood, nephew of Lord Londonderry, etc. etc.

To have such friends as these was, for any well-conducted young man, much; but it was a good deal more to be the favourite attendant of the most eminent professors. Professor Henslow, father-in-law of Sir Joseph Hooker, was much won upon by the young man, and took to him with the most open consideration,-" circumstance which," says Darwin, " influenced my whole career more than any other." It led by and by, namely, to his appointment to the Beagle; but was quite as influential, perhaps, in a general scientific way otherwise.