Henslow lectured on botany, and Darwin, though “not a student of botany," attended both his lectures and his field excursions. Presently, then, he got an invitation to Henslow's weekly evenings. So, "before long," says Mr. Darwin, "I became well acquainted with Henslow, and, during the latter half of my time at Cambridge, took long walks with him on most days; so that I was called by some of the Dons 'the man who walks with Henslow; and in the evening I was very often asked to join his family dinner." Intimacy with such a man was to Darwin, as he says himself, "an inestimable benefit." Another friendship of moment for Darwin was that of Henslow's brother-in-law, the naturalist Leonard Jenyns. Through Henslow, Darwin came to know also the somewhat formidable Dr. Whewell, and "on several occasions walked home with him at night!"

There are those who would look invidiously on such an intimate relation as this between a young man and his superior; and who, if enemies, might even flout him with a soupçon of fawn. But Charles Darwin never had an enemy; and we shall presently see how he could face, on ship-board, the British captain that was over him, when what was concerned (slavery) was a truth and a principle that lay at his heart.

But it was with Sedgewick that this professional relation was of the greatest benefit to the ardent young man, eager in the greed of his own. Sedgewick actually took Darwin with him to share in, and be a witness of, all that might be geologically done or said on a tour in North Wales. It was so he learned his geology practically, not through books, but in actual fact. This tour, he admits, taught him "how to make out the geology of a country." What they missed-even that came afterwards to be as instructive a lesson as anything they found. "The plainly scored rocks, the perched boulders,

the lateral and terminal moraines of Cwm Idwal, are so conspicuous, that a house burned down by fire did not tell its story more plainly." And yet-" neither of us saw a trace of them!"

Darwin took his degree in January 1831. writes about the Beagle in August 1831.

Henslow

CHAPTER VIII.

CHARLES DARWIN-CONTINUED.

"THE voyage of the Beagle has been by far the most important event in my life, and has determined my whole career. I owe to the voyage the first real training or education of my mind; I was led to attend closely to several branches of natural history, and thus my powers of observation were improved, though they were always fairly developed. The investigation of the geology of all the places visited was still more important." In the naming of the essential and indispensable consequence of the voyage of the Beagle for the formation of the naturalist and geologist which Charles Darwin alone was, no other words need be added to these of his own.

It was Mr. Darwin's uncle, Josiah Wedgewood, who brought about the required crisis. The loving father would not part with the son, and the loving son, who, not to vex his father, had, though sorely against the grain, declined the appointment, was here at Maer (September 1) to shoot! The silent reserved man that Josiah was, 1)—to bundled his nephew into his gig, and bowled him over the thirty miles at once to Shrewsbury to make his brotherin-law see reason. And his brother-in-law did straightway see reason when driven home by "the most sensible man in the world," as was to him the somewhat "awful man who would not swerve an inch from the right course for

any power on earth. There had been a check, too, at first, on the part of the captain of the ship; Darwin's nose lacked energy, he thought; and he threw for a time cold water on his going. It is remarkable that on such small circumstances as his uncle's drive and the shape of his nose depended that whole voyage of the Beagle and all that came of it for Darwin-in a word, his life and work. Mr. Darwin himself says this; and of course there is truth in it, though it may not be quite right to credit circumstances so that if Alexander the Great had not bathed in the river Cydnus, there would not have been any voyage of the Beagle at all. A man may go round to his house by the street on the east, or by the street on the west: almost absolutely, it will not make the difference of sixpence in his bank-book by the end of the year!

'What a glorious day the 4th of November will be to me! My second life will then commence, and it shall be as a birthday for the rest of my life." In this sanguine way writes Charles Darwin in October; but it was the 27th December before the Beagle was allowed by circumstances finally to set sail. From Tuesday, this 27th December 1831, till the evening of Sunday, the 2nd October 1836, Charles Darwin was a wanderer round the world. He reached his home at Shrewsbury on the morning of Tuesday the 4th at breakfast time, when his delighted father, the good old doctor, in his lively falsetto gave the cry, "Why, the shape of his head is quite altered!" In five years, and such five years, change enough there must have been. The callow youth, with his fresh cheek, and his ready assent, was now a man. Reflection gave the vigour of line to the face; and his keen observing eyes were deep within their, now much more gravely, overhanging brows. The expression of the head, consequently, its movable contour, might be

changed, but not possibly at least not possibly much between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-eight-the bony case itself.

Changes there were, great changes, changes bodily, changes mental. Of the bodily frame, namely, there was that most sad and serious change the change of health. "For nearly forty years Charles Darwin never knew one day of the health of ordinary men." It seems pretty certain that this was a consequence of the voyage. While on the Beagle he had suffered almost constantly from seasickness; and a peculiar illness which he had in South America may have added its quota to the bad effects of the sickness. Darwin himself, later in life, seemed rather to think of "hereditary fault;" but we hear of no such fault either in father or in mother. That father and grandfather might have suffered at times from a sense of fatigue," was not possibly a consequence of hereditary fault, surely; if for nothing but their enormous bulk; while the sea-sickness was a certain fact. His shipmates write strongly of it; and his own letters, even the latest, are explicit in complaint. His very Journal, as printed, almost concludes thus: "If a person suffer much from sea-sickness, let him weigh it heavily in the balance. I speak from experience: it is no trifling evil, cured in a week."

But let there be doubt in any way of the cause, there can be no doubt of the fact of the illness. After his return, again to say it, for the rest of his life, Charles Darwin never knew a day of ordinary health. The slightest thing excited him; and the slightest excitement threw him as into collapse, with shivering, vomiting, and agonising headache for forty-eight hours. They who know can tell us that there are those, not otherwise infirm, who suffer periodically thus. Emerson was one of them-perhaps Hegel-perhaps Plato. Darwin was