ABSTRACT
Boys will be boys—unless they are idiots—and Darwin when a boy was a boy; and in that respect he never grew up. As Alfred Wallace said in reviewing one of Darwin’s books, his restless curiosity as a child to know the “what for,” the “why,” and the “how” of everything never abated its force. Darwin himself showed great insight into this matter. The wife of his old friend Lyell asked him how her children could be given a taste for natural history. There are a billion years behind that inheritance, and millions of years behind the evolution of a family group not unlike that into which Darwin was born—father and mother, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins and grandparents. The net result was an open eye for nature, a keen interest in nature, and a conviction that by solving the riddle of nature he could carry on the family tradition and be worthy of his mother’s love.
