Darwin’s Bad Habits

My latest amusing find is from the autobiography of Charles Darwin. Often delightful in its candor, the book recounts how the young Darwin had plenty of bad habits related to his predilection for collection and cataloguing. He wasted massive stretches of time shooting birds and tracking his kills, so much so that his father sent him to Cambridge in hopes that he wouldn’t turn out to be a complete loser. At college he still spent plenty of time shooting, but he also avidly engaged in collecting beetles. Though he didn’t study his specimens at any length, but he felt compelled to gather them. He recounts one experience in particular:

One day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one.[mfn]Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882, ed. Nora Barlow (London: Collins, 1958), 62.[/mfn]

I can only surmise that he learned not to conduct scientific analysis of unknown species with his tongue. That knowledge, no doubt, helped him not to win a Darwin Award of his own.

Come to think of it, I believe I’ve seen archival video of Darwin in action:

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