When Darwin set out on the _Beagle_, unlike Huxley, he was an
enthusiastic collecting naturalist. He had wandered from county to
county in England adding new specimens to his collections of
butterflies and beetles. As the _Beagle_ went round the world visiting
remote islands, far from land in the centre of the waters,
archipelagoes of islands crowding together, islands hugging the shore
of continents, and the great continents of the old and new worlds, he
continued to collect and to classify. Gradually the resemblances and
differences between the creatures inhabiting different parts of the
earth began to strike him as exhibiting an orderly plan. He saw that
under apparently the same conditions of food and temperature and
moisture, in different parts of the world the genera and species were
different, and that they were most alike in regions between which
there was the most recent chance of migrations having taken place. In
the quietness of England, while Huxley was on the _Rattlesnake_,
Darwin was slowly working towards the explanation of all he had seen:
towards the conception that animals and plants had spread slowly from
common centres, becoming more and more different from each other as
they spread.
Pages:
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61