Today you can visit Charles Darwin’s house as a museum, just 9 miles (15 km) southeast of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. The building is Down House, and it lies in the village of Downe. Today it looks just the same as it did when Charles Darwin lived there, with the rooms rich in original décor and authentic furnishings – but the back-story is very different. In 1907, the premises were sold and re-fitted to become Downe School for Girls. It remained so until 1922, when another girls’ school took over and ran until 1927. By this time, the rooms that Darwin used had all been stripped out, repainted in grey and converted into classrooms. The school building was then purchased in 1929 by a surgeon, Sir George Buckston Browne, with the idea of turning it into a museum. Down House was eventually acquired by English Heritage in 1996 and it reopened to the public after extensive refurbishment in April 1998. I have visited it many times and chaired meetings there. My friend Stephen Jay Gould flew over to speak at a conference I was organizing at the house. Original items from Darwin’s time have been returned over the years, and other items that are similar to the original furnishings have been purchased. Walking through the house today, it is hard to imagine it stripped bare and repainted as hordes of pubescent women tramped through its hallowed corridors for so many years – at that time, the interior was unrecognizable. The home now is a latter-day reconstruction, though the visitor may not easily discover the fact.13
Another frequent misconception is that Darwin was the official naturalist when he made his famous voyage in the Beagle. In a statement in the Origin of Species of 1859, Darwin claims to have ‘been on board HMS Beagle, as naturalist’. The implication is not correct. The ship already had an officially appointed naturalist, Robert McKormick, who also served as the ship’s doctor. Darwin was on board as the travelling companion of the ship’s master, Admiral Robert FitzRoy, the person who invented weather forecasts. He had invited Darwin because of his reading theology at Cambridge. FitzRoy was a fervent Christian, and hoped that Charles Darwin could utilize his knowledge to reconcile geology and biology to the teaching of the Bible. Darwin may have claimed to have been the ship’s naturalist in his later writings, but at the time he wrote that his appointment was ‘not a very regular affair’. We like to imagine that the Beagle was an explorers’ vessel on a civil voyage of discovery, but she was actually a Royal Navy warship: a Cherokee-class brig. This was a naval expedition, not a journey of discovery. And the captain had an ulterior motive; three captives had been brought to England from Tierra del Fuego; they had been taught English and trained as Christian missionaries. FitzRoy had taken on the major share of financing the voyage, because he wanted to return these men to the country of their birth where they could spread the word of God to this newly discovered land. The Navy organized the voyage on condition that FitzRoy meticulously surveyed the coast and the oceans around South America, so that precise navigational charts could be drawn up. Looking for new forms of life was nowhere in the plans.
The ship set sail on December 27, 1831. Darwin soon became absorbed by the many exotic life forms he encountered on that famous holiday. He was able to go ashore at will to collect and explore to his heart’s content. His adventures were comprehensively detailed in a book he wrote describing the voyage of the Beagle.14
He came to realize how coral atolls were formed, and he published a monograph entitled The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs. His adventures were many: in Chile he witnessed an earthquake. On the Galápagos Islands he dined on the flesh of the giant tortoises and later described how the different shapes of their shells seemed to match the lifestyle imposed by the environmental situation of the different islands. The Galápagos finches, he concluded, were similar to those on the mainland but had clearly changed over time. He noted: ‘Such facts undermine the stability of species.’ He then changed it by adding one cautionary word: ‘Such facts would undermine the stability of species.’ There was no implication here that the presumed changeability of species was a novel concept, just that his observations substantiated the accepted view.15
The accessible style and exotic nature of the subject brought a wide readership, and suddenly Darwin had a new career – as an author of popular science. To me, his most visible legacy is his list of published books, which represent a remarkable devotion to making science accessible. They are all vividly written. Apart from the Origin of Species, he wrote on the geology of South America and on volcanic islands (1844), on the fertilization of orchids (1862), the movements of climbing plants (1865), the effects of cultivation on variation in plants and animals (1868), the Descent of Man (1871), insectivorous plants (1875), the effects of cross-fertilization in plants (1876), The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species (1877), and finally The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits (1881). This last title was a best-seller. Remember, Darwin’s book on worms sold far more copies during his lifetime than the Origin of Species.
Curiously, Charles Darwin showed no interest in dinosaurs. He is the person who popularized the theory of evolution, in which dinosaurs would play such an important part, but he did not include them in any of his books. How curious that Robert Darwin, who had presented the first scientific account of a fossil reptile in 1719, had been Charles’ great-grandfather. Since Charles’ grandfather Erasmus had also written about evolution, it is surprising that although Charles Darwin himself was fascinated by fossils, he had nothing to say about dinosaurs. Although the fact is little discussed these days, Charles Darwin was an expert with the microscope and he became interested in the microscopical structure of fossilized plants. He knew that they had been faithfully preserved in rock, but how much could you discern with the microscope? Was the cellular structure preserved?16
Darwin was not the first to speculate thus. As long ago as May 27, 1663, Robert Hooke at the Royal Society of London had looked at fossilized wood under his microscope. As we have seen (here), Hooke had carefully scrutinized his specimen of fossilized wood, and had worked out how it was formed, and he ascertained that the fossil sample showed the same structure as a specimen of fresh wood:
I found, that the grain, colour, and shape of the Wood, was exactly like this petrify’d substance; and with a Microscope, I found, that all those Microscopical pores, which in sappy or firm and sound Wood are fill’d with the natural or innate juices of those Vegetables, in that they were all empty, like those of Vegetables charr’d …17
By 1665 Hooke had recognized that fossil wood was similar to the structure of present-day plants. Darwin made the same observation, but he took it a stage further. Rather than simply inspecting the surface, he resolved to have the rocky fossils ground down with an abrasive paste to produce the thinnest of sections – so fine that light could shine through to reveal the inner structure. He had collected fossilized wood during his sojourn on HMS Beagle in 1834 when they called at the Isla Grande de Chiloé, midway along the coast of Chile. He noted at the time that he had found numerous specimens of ‘black lignite and silicified and pyritous wood, often embedded close together.’ Joseph Dalton Hooker, the founder of geographical botany and the director of Kew Gardens for 20 years, was a close friend of Darwin’s and he catalogued the specimens for the British Geological Survey in 1846. The collections were then lost for 165 years, until Howard Falcon-Lang, of the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway College of the University of London, investigated some drawers in a cabinet labelled ‘unregistered fossil plants’ in the vaults of the British Geological Survey near Nottingham. Falcon-Lang reported: ‘Inside the drawers were hundreds of beautiful glass slides made by polishing fossil plants into thin translucent sheets, a process [that] allows them to be studied under the microscope. Almost the first slide I picked up was labelled C. Darwin Esq.’ This remarkable discovery was a treasure trove, and all the slides have now been digitized and put online for public scrutiny.
Stylised portrayals of an ichthyosaur and plesiosaur were published by