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Here there was much tedious charting for Fitzroy, and Darwin could now leave the vessel for a lengthy trip on shore. This was doubly welcome. Seasickness was nearly constant with Darwin while on this entire voyage and every opportunity to work on land was eagerly seized. This region, too, was rich in objects of interest and in strange people.
I must here relate an incident that now occurred, and which will serve to illustrate the resourcefulness and surgical knowledge of a race of people who, had they met them, Darwin, Huxley and Frank Buckland would have delighted in and made known to the world. I shall describe it as briefly and as clearly as possible.
Peak was uncertain, says the author, with that faint ironical touch which became almost habitual to him, 'as to the limits of modern latitudinarianism until he met Chilvers, the sleek, clerical advocate of 'Less St. Paul and more Darwin, less of Luther and more of Herbert Spencer':
Darwin thus speaks of it: "The inhabitants, living chiefly upon shell-fish, are obliged constantly to change their place of residence, but return at intervals to the same spot. At night five or six of them, unprotected from the wind and rain of this tempestuous climate, sleep on the wet ground, coiled up like animals.
Three weeks after leaving England the ship touched land for the first time at St. Jago, in the Cape de Verd Islands, and Darwin found his attention vividly engaged by the volcanic phenomena and the signs of upheaval which the island presented.
Only Samuel Butler, on whom Darwin had acted homeopathically, reacted against him furiously; ran up the Lamarckian flag to the top-gallant peak; declared with penetrating accuracy that Darwin had 'banished mind from the universe'; and even attacked Darwin's personal character, unable to bear the fact that the author of so abhorrent a doctrine was an amiable and upright man.
His objections to details are of the old sort, so battered and hackneyed on this side of the Channel, that not even a Quarterly Reviewer could be induced to pick them up for the purpose of pelting Mr. Darwin over again.
Darwin, as having been born into the household of one of the prophets of evolution, to arrive at conclusions about the fixity of species which, if not so born, he might never have reached at all; this does not make it any easier for him to have got others to agree with him.
The Angel was an idealized picture of my daughter. "I dedicated the book to my husband, Mr. Charles Darwin Porter, for several reasons, the chiefest being that he deserved it.
But, waiving this, the "my's," within which a little rift had begun to show itself in 1866, might well become as mute in 1869 as they could become without attracting attention, when Mr. Darwin saw the passages just quoted, and the hundred pages or so that lie between them. I suppose Mr.
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