My great desire was to walk out over the sea as far as I could, and then lie flat on it, face downwards, and peer into the depths.  I was tormented with this ambition, and, like many grown-up people, was so fully occupied by these vain and ridiculous desires that I neglected the actual natural pleasures around me.  The idea was not quite so demented as it may seem, because we were in the habit of singing, as well as reading, of those enraptured beings who spend their days in ’flinging down their golden crowns upon the jasper sea’.  Why, I argued, should I not be able to fling down my straw hat upon the tides of Oddicombe?  And, without question, a majestic scene upon the Lake of Gennesaret had also inflamed my fancy.  Of all these things, of course, I was careful to speak to no one.

It was not with Miss Marks, however, but with my Father, that I became accustomed to make the laborious and exquisite journeys down to the sea and back again.  His work as a naturalist eventually took him, laden with implements, to the rock-pools on the shore, and I was in attendance as an acolyte.  But our earliest winter in South Devon was darkened for us both by disappointments, the cause of which lay, at the time, far out of my reach.  In the spirit of my Father were then running, with furious velocity, two hostile streams of influence.  I was standing, just now, thinking of these things, where the Cascine ends in the wooded point which is carved out sharply by the lion-coloured swirl of the Arno on the one side and by the pure flow of the Mugnone on the other.  The rivers meet, and run parallel, but there comes a moment when the one or the other must conquer, and it is the yellow vehemence that drowns the purer tide.

So, through my Father’s brain, in that year of scientific crisis, 1857, there rushed two kinds of thought, each absorbing, each convincing, yet totally irreconcilable.  There is a peculiar agony in the paradox that truth has two forms, each of them indisputable, yet each antagonistic to the other.  It was this discovery, that there were two theories of physical life, each of which was true, but the truth of each incompatible with the truth of the other, which shook the spirit of my Father with perturbation.  It was not, really, a paradox, it was a fallacy, if he could only have known it, but he allowed the turbid volume of superstition to drown the delicate stream of reason.  He took one step in the service of truth, and then he drew back in an agony, and accepted the servitude of error.

This was the great moment in the history of thought when the theory of the mutability of species was preparing to throw a flood of light upon all departments of human speculation and action.  It was becoming necessary to stand emphatically in one army or the other.  Lyell was surrounding himself with disciples, who were making strides in the direction of discovery.  Darwin had long been collecting facts with regard to the variation of animals and plants.  Hooker