Obituary notices

Francis Darwin, the third son of Charles Darwin, was born at Down on August 16, 1848; he died at Cambridge on September 19, 1925. In his ‘Recollections' (one of the essays in “Spring-time and other Essays” (1920)) he says that he was christened at Malvern—“a fact in which I had a certain unaccountable pride. But now my only sensation is one of surprise at having been christened at all, and a wish that I had received some other name." When he was twelve years old he went to the Grammar School at Clapham kept by the Rev. Charles Pritchard, who became Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. This school was selected on account of its nearness to Down, and also because it “had the merit of giving more mathematics and science than could then be found in public schools.” He was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1866, where, in those more peaceful days, from his bedroom he heard the nightingales sing through the happy May nights. He described the teaching of biology at Cambridge as being “in a somewhat dead condition. Indeed, I hardly think it had advanced much from the state of things which existed in 1828, when my father entered Christ’s College. The want of organised practical work in Zoology was perhaps a blessing in disguise; for it led me to struggle with the subject by myself. I used to get snails and slugs and dissect their dead bodies, comparing my results with books hunted up in the University Library, and this was a real bit of education.” On one occasion “a thoughtful brother sent me a dead porpoise, which (to the best of my belief) I dissected, to the horror of the bedmaker, in my College rooms.” After obtaining a First Class in the Natural Sciences Tripos in 1870 he went to St. George’s Hospital and in due course took the Cambridge M. B. degree. In London he “had the luck to work in the laboratory of Dr. Klein,” who gave him “the first opportunity of seeing science in the making—of seeing research from the inside” and thus implanted in his mind the desire to work at science for its own sake. The chance of doing this, he says, came when his father took him as his assistant. He did not carry out his intention of becoming a practising physician: “happily for me the Fates willed otherwise.” He returned from London to the home at Down and for eight years acted as secretary and assistant to his father.