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these long periods of suffering often made work of any kind an impossibility. "For nearly forty years he never knew one day of the health of ordinary men, and his life was one long struggle against the weariness and strain of sickness."

Under such conditions absolute regularity of routine was essential, and the day's work was carefully planned out. At his best he had three periods of work: from 8 to 9.30; from 10.30 to 12.15; and from 4.30 to 6. Each period being under two hours' duration.

Darwin was a man greatly loved and respected by all who knew him. There was a peculiar charm about his manner, a constant deference to others, and a faculty of seeing the best side of everything and everybody.

The striking characteristic of his manner of work was his respect for time. His natural tendency was to use simple methods and few instruments; little odds and ends were saved for the chance of their proving useful. One quality of mind, which seemed to be of special and extreme advantage in leading him to make discoveries, was the power of never letting exceptions pass unnoticed. He enjoyed experimenting much more than work which only entailed reasoning.

For books he had no respect, regarding them merely as tools to be worked with, and he did not hesitate to cut a heavy book in half, to make it more convenient to hold. He marked the passages bearing on his work, and made an index at the end of the volume. Like many eminent people, he ex

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perienced the greatest difficulty in writing intelligible English, and took much pains to accomplish this. "There seems," he says, "to be a sort of fatality in my mind leading me to put at first my statements or propositions in a wrong or awkward form." His tone of writing was courteous and conciliatory, and he deliberately avoided controversy.

The closing scene in Darwin's life was in the early months of the year 1882, when his health underwent a change for the worse, and on the 19th of April he died. On the 24th he was buried in Westminster Abbey, in accordance with the general feeling that such a man should not go to the grave without public recognition of the greatness of his work.

And of that work, how shall we estimate its value? To form any notion, however inadequate, we must try to realise the world into which he was born; to picture to ourselves what naturalists up to his time were doing, and what were their aims, ambitions and methods.

From the time of Linnæus the majority of naturalists were devoted to classifying, naming, and labelling animals, and then leaving them. Others went further and studied more deeply. Increase of knowledge led to constantly increasing specialisation and division of labour; each worker coming to look on his own department as more or less isolated and independent. There was no bond of union between these men, no system, and no true basis of classification.

What Darwin did was to put the backbone into the whole structure; to knit together knowledge from all sources; to point out clearly what was the real nature of these mysterious affinities between the animals now living; to render possible the conception of Natural History as one coherent whole; to show that the real bond was one of blood-relationship, and that the differences between fossil and living animals, which so impressed Cuvier, were not difficulties in the way of such blood-relationship, but necessary consequences of it; to show men that there was no need for them to invoke mysterious agencies to effect they hardly knew what; to show them that all they had to do was to look about, to follow Lyell's method, and see what was now happening around them, in order to get the clue to the past.

Not merely has he changed the whole aspect of biological science, giving it new aims and new methods; but the influence of his work has spread far beyond its original limits. Principles and laws, first established by him for biology, are now recognised as applying to all departments of science, indeed to all departments of knowledge; and it is to him that the phrase the "Unity of History" owes its real significance.

And if we are struck with the importance and grandeur of the results obtained, so are we equally impressed with the simplicity of the means by which they were achieved. The lesson to be derived from Darwin's life and work cannot be better expressed than as the cumulative importance of infinitely little things.

Such was the man whom we revere and marvel at, for the greatness of his services to mankind and his contributions to human knowledge; and love for the truthfulness, the patient endurance in suffering, and the gentle courtesy of his life.

ACQUIRED CHARACTERS, 102

INDEX

Acraida, warning colours in, 134,

137

Acrania, 175, 188

Adventitious colours, 132

Aggressive resemblances, 122, Argus pheasant, epigamic colora-

131

Aldrovandi, 33

Alluring resemblances, 123, 131

Alpaca, 71

Alpine animals, colours of, 124

Ammonites, 57, 91

Amphibia, 176

pedigree of, 176

Amphioxus, 188

ancestral nature of, 189

development of, 112

Amphiuma, 167

Ancestral history, distortion of,

99

Ancestral stages, omission of, 98
Ancon sheep, 35

Angle-shade moth, protective re-

semblance in, 128

Annelids, fossils of, 60

Annual plant, seeds produced by, Balanus, affinities and develop-

39

Anomodontia, 187

Antlers of deer, 93
Ants, variation in, 43
Apatetic colours, 122
Appendicularia, 191
Apple, varieties of, 46
Archæopteryx, 65, 181

Arctic animals, white colour of,

121, 123, 124

Arctic fox, colour of, 124

Argument from embryology, 78

palæontology, 53

tion of, 143

Aristotle, I

Arthropoda, fossils of, 60

Artificial selection, 27

Artiodactyla, 64

Ascidians, 189

degeneration of, 191

development of, 80

Aspidoceras, 93
Auchenia, 71

Aves, 180

Axolotl, 177

Aztecs, 157

BACTRIAN CAMEL, 71

Baer, Von, 78

Baker, Sir S., on the colour of

the giraffe, 125

Balanoglossus, 158

ment of, 82

Balfour, 78

Bantam fowl, 35
Barb pigeon, 28
Barnacles, see Balanus, 82

monograph on by Darwin, 213

Bat, wing of, 164, 168
Beagle, voyage of, 205

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