sweep of knowledge was so great—­botany, geology, zoology, each lending its corroborative aid to the other.  How a youth of Darwin’s age—­he was only twenty-three when in the year 1831 he started round the world on the surveying ship Beagle—­could have acquired such a mass of information fills one with the same wonder, and is perhaps of the same nature, as the boy musician who exhibits by instinct the touch of the master.  Another quality which one would be less disposed to look for in the savant is a fine contempt for danger, which is veiled in such modesty that one reads between the lines in order to detect it.  When he was in the Argentina, the country outside the Settlements was covered with roving bands of horse Indians, who gave no quarter to any whites.  Yet Darwin rode the four hundred miles between Bahia and Buenos Ayres, when even the hardy Gauchos refused to accompany him.  Personal danger and a hideous death were small things to him compared to a new beetle or an undescribed fly.

The second book to which I alluded is Wallace’s “Malay Archipelago.”  There is a strange similarity in the minds of the two men, the same courage, both moral and physical, the same gentle persistence, the same catholic knowledge and wide. sweep of mind, the same passion for the observation of Nature.  Wallace by a flash of intuition understood and described in a letter to Darwin the cause of the Origin of Species at the very time when the latter was publishing a book founded upon twenty years’ labour to prove the same thesis.  What must have been his feelings when he read that letter?  And yet he had nothing to fear, for his book found no more enthusiastic admirer than the man who had in a sense anticipated it.  Here also one sees that Science has its heroes no less than Religion.  One of Wallace’s missions in Papua was to examine the nature and species of the Birds-of-Paradise; but in the course of the years of his wanderings through those islands he made a complete investigation of the whole fauna.  A footnote somewhere explains that the Papuans who lived in the Bird-of-Paradise country were confirmed cannibals.  Fancy living for years with or near such neighbours!  Let a young fellow read these two books, and he cannot fail to have both his mind and his spirit strengthened by the reading.

XII.

Here we are at the final seance.  For the last time, my patient comrade, I ask you to make yourself comfortable upon the old green settee, to look up at the oaken shelves, and to bear with me as best you may while I preach about their contents.  The last time!  And yet, as I look along the lines of the volumes, I have not mentioned one out of ten of those to which I owe a debt of gratitude, nor one in a hundred of the thoughts which course through my brain as I look at them.  As well perhaps, for the man who has said all that he has to say has invariably said too much.