Charles Darwin : his life told in an autobiographical chapter and in a selected series of his published letters / edited by his son, Francis Darwin.

  • Charles Darwin
Date:
1902
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Charles Darwin : his life told in an autobiographical chapter and in a selected series of his published letters / edited by his son, Francis Darwin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    curiously constructed work-table. In the spring of this same year I was sent to a day-school in Shrewsbuiy, where T stayed a year. I have been told that I was much slower in learning than my younger sister Catherine, and I believe that I was in many ways a naughty boy. By the time I went to this day-school* my taste for natural hi-tory, and more especially for collecting, was well developed. I tried to make out the names of plants, and collected all sorts of things, shells, seals, franks, coins, and minerals. The passion for collecting which leads a man to be a systematic naturalist, a virtuoso, or a mieer, was very strong in me, and was clearly innate, as none of my sisters or brother ever had this taste. One little event during this year has fixed itself very firmly in my mind, and I hope that it has done so from my conscience having been afterwards sorely troubled by it; it is curious as showing that apparently I was interested at this early age in the variability of plants ! 1 told another little boy (I believe it was Leighton,! who afterwards became a well-known lichen- ologist and botanist), that I could produce variously coloured polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with certain coloured fliuds, which was of course a monstrous fable, and had never been tried by me. T may here also confess that as a little boy I was much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods, and this was always done for the sake of causing excitement. For instance, I once gathered much valuable fruit from my father's trees and hid it in the shrubbery, and then ran in breathless haste to spread the news that I had discovered a hoard of stolen fruit.J , » , t £ 4. I must have been a very simple little fellow when i tirst went to the school. A boy of the name of Garnett took me * Kent by Rev. G. Case, minister of the Unitaiiau Chapel in the High Street Mis. Darwin was a Unitnrian and nttended Mr. Cases chape , and my father as a little boy went there with his elder sisters. But both he and his brotlicr were christened and intended to belong to the Church of En-land ; and after his early boyhood he seems usually to ha^'c gone to church and not to Mr. Case's. It appears (St. Jame^ s Gazette, December 15,1883) that a mural tablet has been erected to his memory in tlie chapel which is now known as the Free Christian Church. -F. I). t Eev W A Leighton remembers his bringing a flower to school and saving that his mother had taught him how by looking at the insnie of the blossom the name of the plant could bo discoyercd. ]\Ir Leighton Joes rThs greatly roused my attention and curiosity, and I inquired Thim'repeatedly how this could be done?-but lus lesson was •nitiirallv enouerh not transmissible.—F. D. ... , t His father wisely treated this tendency not by making crimes of the fibs, but by making light of the discoveries.—F. D.