tall and thin; and so perhaps his spine the weak point. The sea-sickness may have acted either on its ganglia or itself; and it is consistent with this that it was from the water-cure alone, the cold douche, that he received any benefit.

The voyage otherwise was an infinite gain to Darwin. Thus, as we have seen, it was an infinite gain to him in account with science; but it was no less an infinite gain to him in account with manhood. For science, during the voyage, or as a savant, Charles Darwin trained himself; but as a man he grew in the new life. Hitherto, on the whole, his education in humanity had been, boldly to say so, provincial and scholastic. Certain usual social experiences were, of course, necessary and inevitable. He could shoot, too; and even jump a bar as high as his Adam's apple. Then there were the profaner eventualities of the sporting set. But both experiences and eventualities proved insufficient to relax the stiffening of propriety in his father's son, or his grandfather's grandson. A certain provincial precision was, it may be, even present to impress him on the part of his relatives at Maer.

Then, after that, there were the Professors-gentlemen certainly, but not exactly men of the world.

It was from all this, and impressed, moreover, with the idea that he was only an apprentice, as substitute and stopgap to gather materials for the journeymen, his superiors, that Charles Darwin stepped on to the deck of the Beagle. Tall, thin, young-not yet twenty-three, awkward in movement, a mere unfledged student, stiff, formal, uncertain, but very willing, he was not a happy man at first -under the eyes of his shipmates. Much as he found them, they probably found him. As they were strange to him, and he felt awkward with them; he, doubtless, was strange to them, and they felt awkward with him. So striking, telling-disconcerting, perhaps was the new

experience to him, that he cannot help, in his need of support and sympathy, communicating it to his friend. Henslow. "The officers," he writes to him, "are like the freshest freshmen—that is, in their manners, in everything else widely different." Very widely different,―at first impracticable, indeed,-must have appeared these free-spoken young men of the world to the unaccustomed student, ill at ease in himself. The ready new speech of that familiar new intercourse the chaff must have seemed at first an unintelligible argot to him, and rude, disagreeably rude, painfully rude, uncomfortably rude. The first lieutenant, Wickman, gives voice to how the "fly-catcher" appears to them. "If I were skipper,” he never for a moment hesitates to assure the young man, "I would soon have you and all your d- -d mess out of the place your dd beastly devilment!" How the two sides must have stared at each other! Mr. Francis Osbaldistone in Rob Roy overheard Dickon the horse-jockey whisper to Wilfred the fool-"Look thou, an our French cousin be nat off a' first burst." To which Wilfred answered, "Like enow, for he has a queer outlandish binding on's castor." The midshipmites may, on such a rule, have wickedly enjoyed the first sea-sickness of the fly-catcher; but he dined in the captain's cabin, and they were obliged to call him "Sir"- -a formality, however, that soon yielded to love, as the wickedness of glee to sympathetic respect. There was no "bumptiousness" in the landsman. On the contrary, there was always the ready smile, the concessive blush, the willing word. He was always at his duty as well. No matter how sick they saw he was, to that duty he enduringly stood. He knew all about shooting also, and he could himself shoot-there was, for them, good service to him in that all through. He was "a rare plucked one," too; he shot a condor; he stole up behind a fox

and killed him with his geological hammer; he interposed between a huge penguin and the sea, and fought him sturdily. ("It was a brave bird; and till reaching the sea, it regularly fought and drove me backwards; nothing less than heavy blows would have stopped him; every inch he gained he firmly kept, standing close before me erect and determined," etc.) He and one other man were alone able to fetch water for a large party of officers and sailors utterly prostrated." He was often absent, when the ship was in port, on long excursions on horseback, which, in South America especially, were always adventurous, requiring endurance of much privation, and attended by constant dangers from Gauchos and Indians, as well as from armies and squads of revolutionary soldiers not a bit better than bandits. Then his knowledge and the curious things he could relate to them, his shipmates. Not a bird passed, not a fish leapt, not an insect alighted, but he knew it and named it, and could tell all about it. Sailors, midshipmen, gun-room officers, captain-all saw him, admired him, respected him, loved him. The gun-room officers stood bravely forward for him, and invited him to their mess, even then when the captain himself in a moment of temper pouted at him. And there and then, too, Charles Darwin was himself! Captain Fitz-Roy was not always a pleasant man to deal with. We have a note of this in the first letter of Charles to his father from the sea (i. 232): "Hitherto the voyage has answered admirably to me, and yet I am now more fully aware of your wisdom in throwing cold water on the whole scheme-I should be very cautious in encouraging another," etc. "We had several quarrels," says Mr. Darwin himself; and then he relates how Captain Fitz-Roy" and captains of men-of-war are the greatest men going, far greater than kings or schoolmasters "—took umbrage at him for something he had

answered about slaves, angrily remarking, as Mr. Darwin has it, “ that, as I doubted his word, we could not live any longer together!" "I thought," adds Mr. Darwin on this, "I should have been compelled to leave the ship; but as soon as the news spread, which it did quickly, I was deeply gratified by receiving an invitation from all the gun-room officers to mess with them." The doubting of Fitz-Roy's word simply lay in Darwin's asking him, when he (Fitz-Roy) told him (Darwin) how a slaveholder had asked his slaves whether they were happy and whether they wished to be free" if he thought that the answer of slaves in the presence of their master was worth anything?" One does not wonder here that even the captain of a man-of-war, on coming to see his own childishness, presently sent and apologised. The sweettempered, courteous, concessive Charles Darwin kept always on the best of terms with Fitz-Roy; still it is evident that, in his intrepidity of principle, the young naturalist must have had many tussles in regard to politics with his equally young commander. The former writes Henslow once from Rio: "The captain does everything in his power to assist me and we get on very well, but I thank my better fortune he has not made me a renegade to Whig principles. I would not be a Tory, if it was merely on account of their cold hearts about that scandal to Christian nations-slavery" (i. 237). To another friend, C. Whitley, he writes, fully two years later, from Valparaiso: "If your opinions are the same as formerly, you would agree most admirably with Captain Fitz-Roy-the object of his most devout abhorrence is one of the d-d scientific Whigs. I have often said to him, I once had a very good friend, an out-and-out Tory, and we managed to get on very well together. But he is very much inclined to doubt if ever I really was so much honoured!" The morning after his arrival at home on the termination

of the voyage, he writes a simply friendly letter to his captain; but even in it, while sympathising with him on the shabby treatment which he (Fitz-Roy) received from Government, he cannot help adding, "but I am no renegade"--he means to those (the Government) whom he still calls the" honest Whigs" and by the time we meet my politics will be as firmly fixed and as wisely founded as ever they were." It is eminently characteristic of Charles Darwin that he has no sooner said this than he feels it to be too much of a cut, and must immediately turn the edge of it by interjecting, "I thought when I began this letter I would convince you what a steady and sober frame of mind I was in; but I find I am writing most precious nonsense" with further propitiatory words to the same effect. The evidence is clear, then, of the alleged somewhat strained relations of the two men politically. Nor, perhaps, on the whole, is the character of the one, very much less than that of the other, to be considered pour quelque chose in the resultant heat between them.

'Fitz-Roy's character was a singular one," says Mr. Darwin, "with very many noble features in several respects one of the most noble which I have ever known: he was devoted to his duty, generous to a fault, bold, determined, and indomitably energetic, and an ardent friend to all under his sway. He would undertake any sort of trouble to assist those whom he thought deserved assistance. He was a handsome man, strikingly like a gentleman, with highly courteous manners; he must have inherited much in his appearance from Charles II. His temper was a most unfortunate one. It was usually worst in the early morning, and with his eagle eye he could generally detect something amiss about the ship, and was then unsparing in his blame. He was very kind to me, but was a man very difficult to live with on the intimate terms which necessarily followed from our messing by ourselves in the same cabin. We had several quarrels; for instance" and then follows the story of their warm little altercation in regard to the slaves.