book on the same subject published not many months before he died.

His uncle, Mr. Josiah Wedgwood, of Maer Hall in Staffordshire, had suggested to him that the apparent sinking of superficial bodies was due to the action of earth-worms; and this suggestion started Mr. Darwin on the line of enquiry and experiment described in the latest work of his life. For the purposes of that enquiry a quantity of broken chalk was spread over part of a field at Down, in December, 1842, and after an interval of twenty-nine years, at the end of November, 1871, a trench was dug to test the results. The book on Earth Worms will be mentioned again in order of date; but it is worth while recording here a fact which gives so vivid an illustration of Mr. Darwin's patient, devotion to scientific truth. He seemed never to take a step forward until his footing was perfectly secure; and that is the reason, probably, why his writings have made so profound an impression and so quickly won the assent of his contemporaries.

In the early part of 1839, Mr. Darwin married his cousin, Miss Emma Wedgwood, daughter of Mr. Josiah Wedgwood of Maer Hall, and after a short residence in London he settled in 1842 at Down House,1 near Down, in Kent, for the rest of his days. Down is a quiet little village near the borders of Surrey, three or four miles from the Orpington Station on the South Eastern Railway, between London and Hastings. There, on the pleasant Kentish hills, in the seclusion which was necessary for his work, but near the metropolis, he spent his fruitful days; and, except the record of his published works, there is little to tell of the forty years passed in this quiet retreat. Happy in his home, with children growing up about him, with

1 For the engraving of Down House, and the Greenhouse (given further on), we are indebted to the publishers of The Century, in which they appeared (Vol. XXV., No 3), to illustrate an interesting paper by Mr. Wallace.

means sufficient to live the life of an English country gentleman, and endowed "with a sweet and gentle nature which blossomed into perfection" (as a writer in the Saturday Review said at the time of his death), no better lot could be desired for the student of nature, except that it was marred for years by continued illhealth. The days were many on which he could not work at all, and on many others two or three hours was the compulsory limit of his task; so that the mere bulk of his writings, considering their supreme quality, and the enormous labour of preparing the material, is a lasting tribute to his genius.

Of course, to accomplish all this, he worked systematically. "In preparing his books he had a special set of shelves for each, standing on or near his writingtable, a shelf being devoted to the material destined to form each chapter"; and his days, as far as the state of his health would permit, were carefully parcelled out between work and recreation, to make the best of his time. Retiring to bed at ten, he was an early riser, and often in his library at eight, after breakfast and his first morning walk. Later in the day he generally walked again, often in his own grounds, but sometimes further afield, and then generally by quiet footpaths rather than frequented roads. The walks at one time were varied by rides along the lanes on a favourite black cob; but, some years before Mr. Darwin's death, his four-footed friend fell, and died by the roadside, and from that day the habit of riding was given up. Part of the evening was devoted to his family and his friends, who delighted to gather round him, to enjoy the charm of his bright intelligence and his unrivalled stores of knowledge. To Down, occasionally, came distinguished men from many lands; and there in later years would sometimes be found the younger generation of scientific students, looking up to the great Naturalist with the reverence of disciples, who had experienced his singular modesty, his patient readiness to listen to all opinions, and the winning grace with which he

informed their ignorance and corrected their mistakes. At other times, there was novel-reading, perhaps by Mrs. Darwin; and so the quiet days followed one another, while works were preparing which were to astonish the civilised world.

In the midst of all the delights of home and the demands of study, Mr. Darwin kept an open mind for public affairs. He united the earnest politician with the patient student: a rare combination, which supplies another proof of his largeness of heart and sympathy with his fellow men. In the village of Down he was liked by everybody, old and young; and in his own household the same servants lived year after year under his roof. One of them, Margaret Evans, who assisted in nursing him in his last illness, had come to Down, nearly forty years before, from Shrewsbury, where her uncle and aunt were in Dr. Darwin's service.

The story of Mr. Darwin's life must be read chiefly in his writings. Down House will always be associated with the pigeons of which we read so much in some of his books; with that most unexpected of all guests, the earthworm; with his keen and amusing observations of the habits of his own infants. Such was the simplicity of the man, that all his experiments seem to have been conducted with a singular absence of ostentation. The botanist, Alphonse de Candolle, whose observations are often quoted in the Origin of Species,

says:

It was on a beautiful autumn morning, in 1880, that I arrived at the Orpington Station, where my illustrious friend had a break waiting for me. The drive to Down takes an hour; it presents nothing remarkable, unless it be the residence, surrounded by beautiful trees, of Sir John Lubbock. I will not here speak of the kind reception that was given me at Down, nor of the pleasure which I felt in chatting familiarly with Mr. and Mrs. Darwin, and their son Francis. I will only remark that Darwin at seventy was more animated and seemed happier than when I had seen him forty-one years before. His eye was bright, and his expression cheerful, his conversation varied, free, and pleasing, his English easy for a foreigner to understand. Around the house there were no signs of his

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researches. Darwin used simple means. I looked for the greenhouse, in which those beautiful researches on vegetable hybrids had been made; it contained nothing but a vine.

One thing struck me, although it was nothing uncommon in England, where animals are petted. A heifer and a colt were feeding close to us, with a familiarity which told of kind masters, and I heard the joyful barking of dogs. "Here," said I, "the history of the variations of animals has been written; and, no doubt, the observations are still carried on, for Darwin is never idle." I did not expect that the earthworms -those meanest of animals -over whose habitations I was walking, were to be the subject of a new memoir, in which Darwin was to show once more what great effects may spring from small causes often repeated. He had been busy with them for thirty years, had I known it. On our return to the house, Darwin showed me his study-a large room, lighted on both sides, with one table for writing and another for experimental apparatus. An experiment on the movements of stems and roots was then in progress. I should have liked to see the registers of experiments, but the hours slipped away like minutes.1

1 I have taken this from a condensed translation of the original given in a lecture by Professor L. C. Miall, before the Leeds Philosophical Society, February, 1888.

The quiet life at Down was varied occasionally by journeys in England and Wales, but Mr. Darwin never travelled much after his long voyage in the Beagle. He visited Snowdonia, attracted there by Buckland's account of ice-action, and the result appeared in a paper of great value (1843) on British Glaciers. Years after, we believe, he delivered a lecture before the members of the Literary Institute at Tenby, where some of Mrs. Darwin's relations were then living; but he was little seen in public at any time, though his face became familiar by means of portraits long before he died.1 In 1847 Mr. Darwin was one of the speakers at the Oxford meeting of the British Association, where Robert Chambers, even then mentioned by Lyell as "the author of the Vestiges," read a paper, and Ruskin officiated as Secretary of the Geological Section. It was thirteen years after when the British Association, again at Oxford, discussed with much vehemence the Origin of Species, of which, in 1847, Mr. Darwin had already sketched the outline. The preparation of that book, minute and elaborate as it was, still left time for other laborious work, of which his great monograph on the Cirripedia, published by the Ray Society in two volumes, in 1851 and 1854, was the most remarkable example. It established his fame as a zoologist, and he drew from his observations of the structure and habits of the remarkable family of Barnacles conclusions of the greatest value to comparative anatomists.

In 1853 Mr. Darwin received the medal of the Royal Society; and it happened to be a year of considerable interest in connection with the work of his life. The theory which he was to establish seemed to be "in the air." In 1852 Mr. Herbert Spencer had written an essay in the Leader, arguing that species were modified

1 The portrait of Mr. Darwin which is given with this paper is reproduced by the Woodbury process from a photograph taken by Captain Darwin, for which I have to thank Mr. Francis Darwin, whose kindness in supplying me with particulars of his father's boyhood I also take this opportunity of acknowledging.

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