mmediately attracted considerable popular and scientific
attention, and many editions and cheap reprints have been
issued during the past half century. It is said that
Darwin at first considered himself more as a collector
than as a scientific worker; but experience soon brought
to him the keen enjoyment of the original investigator.
The most striking feature of the book is the combined
minuteness and breadth of his observations and
descriptions. There can be no doubt that it was the
gathered results of his discoveries, and the study of his
collected specimens of the zoology, botany, and geology of
the countries visited; his graphic presentation of their
physical geography; and their synthetic analysis, which
laid the foundations of his great generalisations of the
"Origin of Species." (See SCIENCE.)

After having been twice driven back by heavy south-west gales, H.M.S.
Beagle, a ten-gun brig, under the command of Captain Fitzroy, R.N.,
sailed from Devonport on December 27, 1831. The object of the expedition
was to complete the survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, commenced
under Captain King in 1826-30; to survey the shores of Chile, Peru, and
of some of the islands in the Pacific; and to carry a chain of
chronometrical measurements round the world.

On January 16, 1832, we touched at Porto Praya, St. Jago, in the Cape de
Verde archipelago, and sailed thence to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Delight
is a weak term to express the higher feelings of wonder, astonishment,
and devotion which fill the mind of a naturalist in wandering through
the Brazilian tropical forest. The noise from the insects is so loud
that it may be heard at sea several hundred yards from the shore, yet
within the recesses of the forest a universal silence seems to reign.
The wonderful and beautiful flowering parasites invariably struck me as
the most novel object in these grand scenes. Among the cabbage-palms,
waving their elegant heads fifty feet from the ground, were woody
creepers, two feet in circumference, themselves covered by other
creepers.

The humming birds are fond of shady spots, and these little creatures,
with their brilliant plumage, buzzing round the flowers with wings
vibrating so rapidly as scarcely to be visible, seek the tiny insects in
the calyx rather than the fabled honey. Insects are particularly
numerous, the bees excepted. The Beagle was employed surveying the
extreme southern and eastern co