The Autobiography of Charles Darwin | Page 4

and attended Mr. Case's chapel, and my father as a little boy
went there with his elder sisters. But both he and his brother were
christened and intended to belong to the Church of England; and after
his early boyhood he seems usually to have gone to church and not to
Mr. Case's. It appears ("St. James' Gazette", Dec. 15, 1883) that a mural
tablet has been erected to his memory in the chapel, which is now
known as the 'Free Christian Church.') my taste for natural history, and
more especially for collecting, was well developed. I tried to make out
the names of plants (Rev. W.A. Leighton, who was a schoolfellow of
my father's at Mr. Case's school, remembers his bringing a flower to
school and saying that his mother had taught him how by looking at the
inside of the blossom the name of the plant could be discovered. Mr.
Leighton goes on, "This greatly roused my attention and curiosity, and
I enquired of him repeatedly how this could be done?"--but his lesson
was naturally enough not transmissible.--F.D.), 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 miser, 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! I told
another little boy (I believe it was Leighton, who afterwards became a
well-known lichenologist and botanist), that I could produce variously
coloured polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with certain
coloured fluids, which was of course a monstrous fable, and had never
been tried by me. I 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.
I must have been a very simple little fellow when I first went to the
school. A boy of the name of Garnett took me into a cake shop one day,
and bought some cakes for which he did not pay, as the shopman
trusted him. When we came out I asked him why he did not pay for
them, and he instantly answered, "Why, do you not know that my uncle
left a great sum of money to the town on condition that every
tradesman should give whatever was wanted without payment to any
one who wore his old hat and moved [it] in a particular manner?" and
he then showed me how it was moved. He then went into another shop
where he was trusted, and asked for some small article, moving his hat
in the proper manner, and of course obtained it without payment. When
we came out he said, "Now if you like to go by yourself into that
cake-shop (how well I remember its exact position) I will lend you my
hat, and you can get whatever you like if you move the hat on your
head properly." I gladly accepted the generous offer, and went in and
asked for some cakes, moved the old hat and was walking out of the
shop, when the shopman made a rush at me, so I dropped the cakes and
ran for dear life, and was astonished by being greeted with shouts of
laughter by my false friend Garnett.
I can say in my own favour that I was as a boy humane, but I owed this
entirely to the instruction and example of my sisters. I doubt indeed
whether humanity is a natural or innate quality. I was very fond of
collecting eggs, but I never took more than a single egg out of a bird's

nest, except on one single occasion, when I took all, not for their value,
but from a sort of bravado.
I had a strong taste for angling, and would sit for any number of hours
on the bank of a river or pond watching the float; when at Maer (The
house of his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood.) I was told that I could kill the
worms with salt and water, and from that day I never spitted a living
worm, though at the expense probably of some loss of success.
Once as a very little boy whilst at the