Though never robust in health, he enjoyed all the usual boyish sports, especially such as appealed to his imagination and love of adventure.  Not far from the school a natural cave, formed in a chalky slope and partially concealed by undergrowth, made an excellent resort for “brigands”; and to this hiding place were brought potatoes and other provisions which could be cooked and eaten in primitive fashion, with an air of secrecy which added to the mystery and attraction of the boyish adventure.

It is curious to note that one destined to become a great traveller and explorer should have found the study of geography “a painful subject.”  But this was, as he afterwards understood, entirely due to the method of teaching then, and sometimes now, in vogue, which made no appeal whatever to the imagination by creating a mental picture of the peoples and nations, or the varied wonders and beauties of nature which distinguish one country from another.  “No interesting facts were ever given, no accounts of the country by travellers were ever read, no good maps ever given us, nothing but the horrid stream of unintelligible place names to be learnt.”  The only subjects in which he considered that he gained some valuable grounding at school were Latin, arithmetic, and writing.

This estimate of the value of the grammar-school teaching is echoed in Darwin’s own words when describing his school days at precisely the same age at Shrewsbury Grammar School, where, he says, “the school as a means of education to me was simply a blank.”  It is therefore interesting to notice, side by side, as it were, the occupation which each boy found for himself out of school hours, and which in both instances proved of immense value in their respective careers in later life.

Darwin, even at this early age, found his “taste for natural history, and more especially for collecting,” well developed.  “I tried,” he says, “to make out the names of plants, 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 ... was very strong in me, and was clearly innate, as none of my sisters or brothers ever had this taste.”

He also speaks of himself as having been a very “simple little fellow” by the manner in which he was either himself deceived or tried to deceive others in a harmless way.  As an instance of this, he remembered declaring that he could “produce variously coloured polyanthuses and primroses by watering them with certain coloured fluids,” though he knew all the time it was untrue.  His feeling of tenderness towards all animals and insects is revealed in the fact that he could not remember—­except on one occasion—­ever taking more than one egg out of a bird’s nest; and though a keen angler, as soon as he heard that he could kill the worms with salt and water he never afterwards “spitted a living worm, though at the expense, probably, of some loss of success!”