Charles Darwin's study

This house is the birthplace of arguably the greatest idea ever to occur to a human mind.  It’s Down House, Charles Darwin’s house, and it was here that he produced the idea of evolution by natural selection, the explanation for the whole of life, for its diversity, its beauty, its elegance, its complexity, and the uncanny illusion of design.

And there’s one room in this house that gives the key to how Darwin thought and how he worked. And this is it.  This is Charles Darwin’s study where he did his thinking, his reading, his writing, and it served him as a laboratory because he did a lot of his own experiments in this house.

Looking around at his things you can almost eavesdrop on his thought processes in this room.  It’s book lined with lots of scientific apparatus.  There’s Darwin’s microscope here.  He’s got various tools, surgical instruments here - scalpels and scissors and things. These are his precious notebooks.  Darwin kept a series of notebooks throughout his life in which he jotted down his thoughts and they’re a very, very important historical resource.  Over there we have a table with various scientific instruments and specimens which he kept in little pill boxes.  There are pictures.  These are pictures of Darwin’s great heroes and friends.  On the left is Hooker, the great botanist, one of Darwin’s closest friends and advisers.  In the middle is Charles Lyle, the great geologist of the time, who was Darwin’s mentor.

As a young man at Cambridge Darwin had been destined for the church.  But then his life took a wonderful turn when he was offered an opportunity of a round the world voyage on HMS Beagle.  He was terribly seasick, he didn’t enjoy the actual sea part of the voyage very much, but he had a wonderful time, especially in South America.  He made the most remarkable discoveries.  He discovered fossils.  And it was during this time that he gradually began to get an inkling of the idea that there might be more to species than special creation - each one separately.

One of the places where the Beagle stopped was the Galapagos Islands.  There Darwin was able to see that each island had its own variety or its own species and these were recognisably similar to species on the mainland but they were sufficiently different, and it was clear to Darwin that something odd was going on here.  And that was perhaps the germ of the idea that later, in Down House, was to mature into the idea of evolution by natural selection.

Very soon after he got back to England he became an invalid with an undisclosed illness - a rather mysterious illness; it might have been a tropical infection picked up in South America - and he was an invalid for the rest of his life.  He spent virtually all his time in this house, much of it in this study.  In a way that might have helped him to become so productive, because he didn’t, as probably would have happened to him if he hadn’t been an invalid, he didn’t constantly go rushing up to London to give lectures and to meet people.  People came to him.  And so he was able to centre his life around this house and became an extremely productive worker, even though he was not at all a well man.

Darwin did most of his writing on a board which was across the arms of this armchair.  This was Darwin’s armchair, and he did his writing in this armchair.  It was on wheels so he could wheel it around the room when he wanted to go and visit different parts of the room.  And it was on that board, in this chair, that Darwin wrote The Origin Of Species, his great book.  He wrote lots of great books, but this was the greatest of them.  The Original Of Species is Darwin’s advocacy, Darwin’s explanation, of the theory of evolution by natural selection. 

The legacy of Charles Darwin is immense, flowing out of this room, right through the 20th century to the 21st century.  He’s had an influence obviously on my own subject of biology, an enormous influence, but also on other subjects like psychology, anthropology, history.  There’s hardly a single branch of human learning hasn’t been influenced by Charles Darwin.