CHAPTER VIII.

LIFE AT DOWN.

1842-1854.

"My life goes on like clockwork, and I am fixed on the spot where I shall end it.' Letter to Captain Fitz-Roy, October, 1846. CERTAIN letters which, chronologically considered, belong to the period 1845–54 have been utilised in a later chapter where the growth of the Origin of Species is described. In the present chapter we only get occasional hints of the growth of my father's views, and we may suppose ourselves to be seeing his life, as it might have appeared to those who had no knowledge of the quiet development of his theory of evolution during this period.

On Sept. 14, 1842, my father left London with his family and settled at Down.* In the Autobiographical chapter, his motives for moving into the country are briefly given. He speaks of the attendance at scientific societies and ordinary social duties as suiting his health so "badly that we resolved to live in the country, which we both preferred and have never repented of." His intention of keeping up with scientific life in London is expressed in a letter to Fox (Dec., 1842) :———

"I hope by going up to town for a night every fortnight or three weeks, to keep up my communication with scientific men and my own zeal, and so not to turn into a complete Kentish hog."

Visits to London of this kind were kept up for some years at the cost of much exertion on his part. I have often heard him speak of the wearisome drives of ten miles to or from Croydon or Sydenham-the nearest stations-with an old gardener acting as coachman, who drove with great caution and slowness up and down the many hills. In later years,

* I must not omit to mention a member of the household who accompanied him. This was his butler, Joseph Parslow, who remained in the family, a valued friend and servant, for forty years, and became, as Sir Joseph Hooker once remarked to me, an integral part of the family, and felt to be such by all visitors at the house."

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regular scientific intercourse with London became, as before mentioned, an impossibility.

The choice of Down was rather the result of despair than of actual preference: my father and mother were weary of househunting, and the attractive points about the place thus seemed to them to counterbalance its somewhat more obvious faults. It had at least one desideratum, namely, quietness. Indeed it would have been difficult to find a more retired place so near to London. In 1842 a coach drive of some twenty miles was the usual means of access to Down; and even now that railways have crept closer to it, it is singularly out of the world, with nothing to suggest the neighbourhood of London, unless it be the dull haze of smoke that sometimes clouds the sky. The village stands in an angle between two of the larger high-roads of the country, one leading to Tunbridge and the other to Westerham and Edenbridge. It is cut off from the Weald by a line of steep chalk hills on the south, and an abrupt hill, now smoothed down by a cutting and embankment, must formerly have been something of a barrier against encroachments from the side of London. In such a situation, a village, communicating with the main lines of traffic, only by stony tortuous lanes, may well have preserved its retired character. Nor is it hard to believe in the smugglers and their strings of pack-horses making their way up from the lawless old villages of the Weald, of which the memory still existed when my father settled in Down. The village stands on solitary upland country, 500 to 600 feet above the sea-a country with little natural beauty, but possessing a certain charm in the shaws, or straggling strips of wood, capping the chalky banks and looking down upon the quiet ploughed lands of the valleys. The village, of three or four hundred inhabitants, consists of three small streets of cottages meeting in front of the little flint-built church. It is a place where new-comers are seldom seen, and the names occurring far back in the old church registers are still known in the village. The smock-frock is not yet quite extinct, though chiefly used as a ceremonial dress by the "bearers" at funerals; but as a boy I remember the purple or green smocks of the men at church.

The house stands a quarter of a mile from the village, and is built, like so many houses of the last century, as near as possible to the road- -a narrow lane winding away to the Westerham high-road. In 1842, it was dull and unattractive enough a square brick building of three storeys, covered with shabby whitewash, and hanging tiles. The garden had

none of the shrubberies or walls that now give shelter; it was overlooked from the lane, and was open, bleak, and desolate. One of my father's first undertakings was to lower the lane by about two feet, and to build a flint wall along that part of it which bordered the garden. The earth thus excavated was used in making banks and mounds round the lawn: these were planted with evergreens, which now give to the garden its retired and sheltered character.

The house was made to look neater by being covered with stucco, but the chief improvement effected was the building of a large bow extending up through three storeys. This bow became covered with a tangle of creepers, and pleasantly varied the south side of the house. The drawing-room, with its verandah opening into the garden, as well as the study in which my father worked during the later years of his life, were added at subsequent dates.

Eighteen acres of land were sold with the house, of which twelve acres on the south side of the house form a pleasant field, scattered with fair-sized oaks and ashes. From this field a strip was cut off and converted into a kitchen garden, in which the experimental plot of ground was situated, and where the greenhouses were ultimately put up.

During the whole of 1843 he was occupied with geological work, the result of which was published in the spring of the following year. It was entitled Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands, visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, together with some brief notices on the geology of Australia and the Cape of Good Hope; it formed the second part of the Geology of the Voyage of the Beagle, published "with the Approval of the Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty's Treasury." The volume on Coral Reefs forms Part I. of the series, and was published, as we have seen, in 1842. For the sake of the non-geological reader, I may here quote Sir A. Geikie's words * on these two volumes-which were up to this time my father's chief geological works. Speaking of the Coral Reefs, he says (p. 17): "This well-known treatise, the most original of all its author's geological memoirs, has become one of the classics of geological literature. The origin of those remarkable rings of coral-rock in mid-ocean has given rise to much speculation, but no satisfactory solution of the problem had been proposed. After visiting many of them, and examining also coral reefs that fringe islands and continents, he offered a theory which for simplicity and grandeur,

*Charles Darwin, Nature Series, 1882.

strikes every reader with astonishment. It is pleasant, after the lapse of many years, to recall the delight with which one first read the Coral Reefs, how one watched the facts being marshalled into their places, nothing being ignored or passed lightly over; and how, step by step, one was led to the grand conclusion of wide oceanic subsidence. No more admirable example of scientific method was ever given to the world, and even if he had written nothing else, the treatise alone would have placed Darwin in the very front of investigators of nature."

It is interesting to see in the following extract from one of Lyell's letters * how warmly and readily he embraced the theory. The extract also gives incidentally some idea of the theory itself.

"I am very full of Darwin's new theory of Coral Islands, and have urged Whewell to make him read it at our next meeting. I must give up my volcanic crater theory for ever, though it cost me a pang at first, for it accounted for so much, the annular form, the central lagoon, the sudden rising of an isolated mountain in a deep sea; all went so well with the notion of submerged, crateriform, and conical volcanoes, . and then the fact that in the South Pacific we had scarcely any rocks in the regions of coral islands, save two kinds, coral limestone and volcanic! Yet in spite of all this, the whole theory is knocked on the head, and the annular shape and central lagoon have nothing to do with volcanoes, nor even with a crateriform bottom. Perhaps Darwin told you when at the Cape what he considers the true cause? Let any mountain be submerged gradually, and coral grow in the sea in which it is sinking, and there will be a ring of coral, and finally only a lagoon in the centre. Coral islands are the last efforts of drowning continents to lift their heads above water. Regions of elevation and subsidence in the ocean may be traced by the state of the coral reefs."

The second part of the Geology of the Voyage of the Beagle, i.e. the volume on Volcanic Islands, which specially concerns us now, cannot be better described than by again quoting from Sir A. Geikie (p. 18):

"Full of detailed observations, this work still remains the best authority on the general geological structure of most of. the regions it describes. At the time it was written the 'crater of elevation theory,' though opposed by Constant Prévost, Scrope, and Lyell, was generally accepted, at least on

*To Sir John Herschel, May 24, 1837. Life of Sir Charles Lyell, vol. ii. p. 12.

the Continent. Darwin, however, could not receive it as a valid explanation of the facts; and though he did not share the view of its chief opponents, but ventured to propose a hypothesis of his own, the observations impartially made and described by him in this volume must be regarded as having contributed towards the final solution of the difficulty." Geikie continues (p. 21): "He is one of the earliest writers to recognize the magnitude of the denudation to which even recent geological accumulations have been subjected. One of the most impressive lessons to be learnt from his account of 'Volcanic Islands' is the prodigious extent to which they have been denuded. . . . He was disposed to attribute more of this work to the sea than most geologists would now admit; but he lived himself to modify his original views, and on this subject his latest utterances are quite abreast of the time."

An extract from a letter of my father's to Lyell shows his estimate of his own work. "You have pleased me much by saying that you intend looking through my Volcanic Islands: it cost me eighteen months!!! and I have heard of very few who have read it.* Now I shall feel, whatever little (and little it is) there is confirmatory of old work, or new, will work its effect and not be lost."

The second edition of the Journal of Researches † was completed in 1845. It was published by Mr. Murray in the Colonial and Home Library, and in this more accessible form soon had a large sale.

C. D. to Lyell. Down [July, 1845].

MY DEAR LYELL-I send you the first part of the new edition, which I so entirely owe to you. You will see that I have ventured to dedicate it to you, and I trust that this cannot be disagreeable. I have long wished, not so much for your sake, as for my own feelings of honesty, to acknowledge

*He wrote to Herbert "I have long discovered that geologists never read each other's works, and that the only object in writing a book is a proof of earnestness, and that you do not form your opinions without undergoing labour of some kind. Geology is at present very oral, and what I here say is to a great extent quite true." And to Fitz-Roy, on the same subject, he wrote: "I have sent my South American Geology to Dover Street, and you will get it, no doubt, in the course of time. You do not know what you threaten when you propose to read it-it is purely geological. I said to my brother, 'You will of course read it,' and his answer was, 'Upon my life, I would sooner even buy it.""

†The first edition was published in 1839, as vol. iii. of the Voyages of the Adventure' and' Beagle.'

No doubt proof-sheets.