Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. STARTING POINTS. ?METHOD OF STARTING INVESTIGATIONS.? ISOLATED PHENOMENA. THE starting points of many of Darwin’s researches were furnished him by other intelligent men. In many cases these men not only were in possession of the facts, but had hit upon their true explanation. With the facts thrust upon them, with enough reasoning ability to pursue them, they gave away their heritage, ? luckily to one who knew its value. In his frank but modest analysis of his own mental qualities he said of himself, as already quoted,
I think I am superior to the common run of men in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully… . From my earliest youth I have had the strongest desire to understand or explain whatever I observed, … that is, to group all facts under some general laws. 1 There can be no doubt that his great interest in apparently little things, and his efforts to make 1 Life and Letters, Vol. I. p. 83. the most of them, were due to his conviction that important things were hidden behind them, that they were illustrations of general laws. Lawson, Vice-Governor of the Galapagos Islands at the time of Darwin’s visit, knew that the tortoises of the different islands differed from one another, and even declared to Darwin that he could tell from which island any tortoise came.1 He had the time, and the material lay at his feet; but he left it for Darwin to make the Galapagos Islands famous as illustrations of the local variations of species. Darwin himself had to have the evidence thrust upon him from several directions before he grasped its significance, but his greater appreciation of the nature and value of the facts made him their master. After his return from the Beagle voyage, Mr. Wedgwood of Maer Hall suggested to him …
