Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/258

248 an eight years' labor. This concluded his education. Of the value of it merely as training and to himself, Sir Joseph Hooker says: "Your father recognized three stages in his career as a biologist: the mere collector at Cambridge; the collector and observer in the Beagle, and for some years afterwards; and the trained naturalist after, and only after, the Cirripede work. That he was a thinker all along is true enough." Huxley says that Darwin never did a wiser thing than when he devoted himself to these years of patient toil. Darwin himself does not indicate that he purposely chose to do this monograph in order to educate himself, and he doubts whether it was worth the time. He seems to have been gradually drawn into it, and to have finished it because he had gone so far. When he had done with it, at any rate, if not before, he was a thoroughly furnished man for such investigation as was to be his title to lasting fame. He had come to be thus equipped by the mere course of his life; by beetles at Cambridge, and the Beagle, and the Cirripedes. Yet if he had planned his education from the start for the express purpose of dealing in the most masterly way with