11 Charles Darwin – At Down House
Before Alfred Russel Wallace returned to England, Charles and Emma Darwin
had settled in Gower Street in London. However, Charles was already showing
signs of the illness that would plague him for the rest of his life and he could not
take the strain of city living. In 1842 they moved fifteen miles out of London to
Down House near Bromley in Kent, surrounded by fields and woods. This was somewhere
where children could run and play, and where a naturalist could walk and think. Life in
the country allowed Darwin to observe nature at close hand, to walk in the surrounding
meadows and woodlands, and to undertake his studies without the interruption of a
London social life.
At Down House Darwin wrote and published three more volumes from his
observations and material collected during his voyage around the world – The
Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, Geological Observations on the Volcanic
Islands Visited during the Voyage of HMS Beagle and Geological Observations on
South America. By October 1846 he was finally finished with all the works derived
from his voyage and wrote to his mentor, John Stevens Henslow:
You cannot think how delighted I am at having finished all my Beagle materials ... it is now
ten years since my return, and your words, which I thought preposterous, are come true,
that it would take twice the number of years to describe, than it took to collect and observe.Darwin continued thinking about the significance of all the creatures on the
Galapagos Islands. He now saw the archipelago as a little world within itself and had
written that in this little world ‘we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great
fact – that mystery of mysteries – the first appearance of new beings on this earth’.
In thinking about the Galapagos Islands he was forced to answer some fundamental
questions. Was the world created in the six days and six nights as described in
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