Part 25 (1/2)

absence. He left home a high-spirited, warm-hearted youth, fond of athletic sports, and vigorous in body. He came back with a pa.s.sionate love for science, ”with the habit of energetic industry and of concentrated attention,” but with health impaired, which made the whole of his after life a battle with suffering. Yet he conquered, and gave to his generation a wonderful example of the power of mind over body; of victory over obstacles.

During the voyage he was an almost constant sufferer from sea-sickness.

He wrote home the last year: ”It is a lucky thing for me that the voyage is drawing to its close, for I positively suffer more from sea-sickness now than three years ago.”

”After perhaps an hour's work,” says Admiral Stokes, ”he would say to me, 'Old fellow, I must take the horizontal for it,' that being the best relief position from s.h.i.+p motion. A stretch out on one side of the table for some time would enable him to resume his labors for a while, when he had again to lie down. It was distressing to witness this early sacrifice of Mr. Darwin's health, who ever afterwards seriously felt the ill effects of the Beagle's voyage.”

Admiral Mellersh says: ”I think he was the only man I ever knew against whom I never heard a word said; and as people, when shut up in a s.h.i.+p for five years, are apt to get cross with each other, that is saying a good deal.” Says another: ”He was never known to be out of temper, or to say one unkind or hasty word _of_ or _to_ any one.”

This lovely spirit, which so endeared him to everybody, Darwin kept through life,--a spirit which sheds a halo around every book he wrote, and makes him worthy the admiration and honor of every young man. Many persons have the gift of writing books, but comparatively few persons have the great gift of self-control.

After a brief visit with his family, Darwin hastened to Cambridge, to prepare his ”Journal of Travels.” He had learned on the Beagle that ”a man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.” After three months of hard work, he went to London, where he finished the ”Journal,” and began working on his ”Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle,” and his ”Geological Observations.” He said at this time: ”I have nothing to wish for, excepting stronger health to go on with the subjects to which I have joyfully determined to devote my life.”

For three years and eight months he worked untiringly. He wrote Henslow: ”I fear the Geology will take me a great deal of time; I was looking over one set of notes, and the quant.i.ty I found I had to read for that one place was frightful. If I live till I am eighty years old I shall not cease to marvel at finding myself an author. In the summer before I started, if any one had told me that I should have been an angel by this time, I should have thought it an equal impossibility. This marvellous transformation is all owing to you.”

Darwin and Lyell now became very intimate friends. ”I am coming into your way, of only working about two hours at a spell,” he writes to Lyell; ”I then go out and do my business in the streets, return and set to work again, and thus make two separate days out of one.” Of Lyell he said: ”One of his chief characteristics was his sympathy with the work of others.... The science of geology is enormously indebted to Lyell--more so, as I believe, than to any other man who ever lived.”

The ”Journal” was published in 1839. January twenty-nine of this year, Mr. Darwin, now thirty years of age, was married to his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, daughter of Josiah Wedgwood of Maer, and granddaughter of the founder of the potteries of Etruria. The extreme happiness of his married life proved the wisdom of his choice. He said in after years, ”No one can be too kind to my dear wife, who is worth her weight in gold many times over.”

They lived at No. 12 Upper Gower Street, as he wrote a college mate, ”a life of extreme quietness.... We have given up all parties, for they agree with neither of us; and if one is quiet in London, there is nothing like its quietness.”

In 1842, his ”Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs” was published, a book which cost him, he says, ”twenty months of hard work, as I had to read every work on the islands of the Pacific, and to consult many charts.” Of this book, Professor Geikie says: ”This well known treatise, the most original of all its author's geological memoirs, has become one of the cla.s.sics of geological literature. The origin of those remarkable rings of coral-rock in mid-ocean has given rise to much speculation, but no satisfactory solution of the problem has been proposed. After visiting many of them, and examining also coral reefs that fringe islands and continents, he offered a theory which, for simplicity and grandeur, strikes every reader with astonishment.... No more admirable example of scientific method was ever given to the world, and, even if he had written nothing else, this treatise alone would have placed Darwin in the very front of investigators of nature.”

Lyell wrote to Darwin concerning this book: ”It is all true, but do not flatter yourself that you will be believed till you are growing bald, like me, with hard work and vexation at the incredulity of the world.”

Darwin's next work, on the ”Volcanic Islands Visited during the Voyage of the Beagle,” was published in 1844. This book, he said, ”cost me eighteen months.” His third geological book, ”Geological Observations on South America,” was published in 1846.

Meantime, tired of smoky London, Darwin purchased a home in Down, a retired village five or six hundred feet above the sea. The house was a square brick building, of three stories, vine-covered, in the midst of eighteen acres. ”Its chief merit,” Darwin writes to a friend, ”is its extreme rurality. I think I was never in a more perfectly quiet country.” Here, for forty years, Darwin lived the isolated life of a student, producing the books that made him the most noted scientist of his century. Of these years, Mr. Darwin said: ”Few persons can have lived a more retired life than we have done. Besides short visits to the houses of relations, and occasionally to the seaside or elsewhere, we have gone nowhere. During the first part of our residence we went a little into society, and received a few friends here; but my health almost always suffered from the excitement.... I have, therefore, been compelled for many years to give up all dinner parties.... From the same cause I have been able to invite here very few scientific acquaintances.

My chief enjoyment and sole employment throughout life has been scientific work; and the excitement from such work makes me for the time forget, or drives quite away, my daily discomfort.”

At Down, Darwin worked for eight years on two large volumes concerning cirripedia (barnacles), describing all the known living species; the extinct species, or fossil cirripedes, were in two smaller volumes. The first books were published by the Ray Society, between 1851 and 1854; the others by the Palaeontographical Society. About two years out of the eight were lost through illness. Sometimes he became half discouraged.

He wrote a friend, ”I have been so steadily going downhill, I cannot help doubting whether I can ever crawl a little uphill again. Unless I can, enough to work a little, I hope my life may be very short, for to lie on a sofa all day and do nothing but give trouble to the best and kindest of wives and good, dear children is dreadful.”

Darwin doubted, in after life, ”whether the work was worth the consumption of so much time,” but Professor Huxley thinks he ”never did a wiser thing than when he devoted himself to the years of patient toil which the cirriped-book cost him.... The value of the cirriped monograph lies not merely in the fact that it is a very admirable piece of work, and const.i.tuted a great addition to positive knowledge, but still more in the circ.u.mstance that it was a piece of critical self-discipline, the effect of which manifested itself in everything he wrote afterwards, and saved him from endless errors of detail.” Darwin's patient labor is shown by his working ”for the last half-month, daily, in dissecting a little animal about the size of a pin's head, from the Chonos archipelago, and I could spend another month, and daily see more beautiful structure.”

During these years from 1846 to 1854, death had twice disturbed the quiet life at Down. In 1849, Dr. Darwin died, and his son Charles was so ill that he could not attend the funeral. In 1851, Annie Darwin died, at the age of ten, after a brief illness. ”She was,” said Darwin, ”my favorite child; her cordiality, openness, buoyant joyousness, and strong affections made her most lovable.... When quite a baby, this [strong affection] showed itself in never being easy without touching her mother when in bed with her; and quite lately she would, when poorly, fondle for any length of time one of her mother's arms.... She would at almost any time spend half an hour in arranging my hair, 'making it,' as she called it, 'beautiful,' or in smoothing, the poor, dear darling, my collar or cuffs--in short, in fondling me.... Her whole mind was pure and transparent. One felt one knew her thoroughly and could trust her. I always thought that, come what might, we should have had, in our old age, at least one loving soul which nothing could have changed.

”All her movements were vigorous, active, and usually graceful. When going round the Sandwalk with me, although I walked fast, yet she often used to go before, pirouetting in the most elegant way, her dear face bright all the time with the sweetest smiles. Occasionally she had a pretty coquettish manner towards me, the memory of which is charming....

”In the last short illness her conduct, in simple truth, was angelic.

She never once complained; never became fretful; was ever considerate of others, and was thankful in the most gentle, pathetic manner for everything done for her. When so exhausted that she could hardly speak, she praised everything that was given her, and said some tea 'was beautifully good.' When I gave her some water, she said, 'I quite thank you;' and these, I believe, were the last precious words ever addressed by her dear lips to me.”

Such consideration and politeness she naturally inherited. Francis Darwin says in his delightful life of his father, ”He always spoke to servants with politeness, using the expression, 'Would you be so good,'

in asking for anything. In business matters he was equally courteous.

His solicitor, who had never met him, said, 'Everything I did was right, and everything was profusely thanked for.'” Of the drawings made by his children, he would say, ”Michael Angelo is nothing to it!” but he always looked carefully at the work and kindly pointed out mistakes.

”He received,” says his son, ”many letters from foolish, unscrupulous people, and all of these received replies. He used to say that if he did not answer them, he had it on his conscience afterwards, and, no doubt, it was in great measure the courtesy with which he answered every one which produced the universal and widespread sense of his kindness of nature which was so evident on his death.”

In November, 1853, Darwin received the Royal Society's Medal. He was gratified, finding it ”a pleasant little stimulus. When work goes badly, and one ruminates that all is vanity, it is pleasant to have some tangible proof that others have thought something of one's labors.”

November 24, 1859, when Darwin was fifty, his great work, ”Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life,” was published. For twenty years he had been making experiments with plants and animals, and filling his note-books with facts. To his old cla.s.smate, Fox, he writes asking that the boys in his school gather lizards' eggs, as well as those of snakes.