of his collections by giving the fossil bones to the College of Surgeons, he had to arrange for the publication of the description of other parts. A grant of 1,000l. from the treasury enabled him to set about the publication of the quarto volumes entitled ‘The Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle.’ The different groups were undertaken by various naturalists: Sir R. Owen, Mr. Blomefield (Jenyns), Professor Bell, &c., Darwin himself supplementing their work by ‘adding habits and ranges, &c., and geographical sketches.’ He also read various papers at the Geological Society, among which was an account of his first observations on the action of worms. And lastly he undertook, much against his will, the secretaryship of the Geological Society, a post which he filled from 1838 to 1841. He found time, moreover, to do some work in English geology. In 1838 he visited Glen Roy, and wrote an essay on the ‘Parallel Roads,’ a piece of work of which he was afterwards ashamed, and which he spoke of as a warning against the use of the method of exclusion in science. His view, which then seemed the only possible one, was afterwards superseded by the glacier-dam theory of Agassiz.
It was during this period that his friendship with Lyell began. He wrote in November 1836: ‘Among the great scientific men, no one has been nearly so friendly and kind as Lyell. … You cannot imagine how good-naturedly he entered into all my plans.’ Lyell received the theory of coral reefs with enthusiasm, although its adoption necessitated the destruction of his own views on the subject. It must have been a great encouragement to Darwin to find himself welcomed as a brother-geologist by such a man as Lyell, the value of whose work he had personally tested and learned to estimate in South America. The acquaintance grew into a friendship which lasted throughout Lyell's life, and Darwin, nearly at the end of his own life, had still the same impression of Lyell's character, declaring that he had never known any man with so keen a sympathy in the work of others.
It was about this time that a failure in his health first became noticeable. Thus as early as October 1837 he wrote: ‘Anything which flurries me completely knocks me up afterwards, and brings on a violent palpitation of the heart.’ Again, in 1839, he was forced by ill-health to take various short holidays; he seems then to have felt, and this feeling remained with him throughout life, that work was the only cure for his discomfort, for he notes, after mentioning his ill-health: ‘I have derived this much good, that nothing is so intolerable as idleness.’ It has often been assumed that the sea-sickness from which he suffered so much during the voyage of the Beagle was the starting-point of his failure in health. There is no evidence to support this belief, and he did not himself share it. His ill-health was of a dyspeptic kind, and may probably have been allied to gout, which was to some extent an hereditary malady. It was the factor which more than any other determined the outward form of his life. For it was the strain of a London life that determined him to settle in the country, and it was the continuance of ill-health that forced him to lead for the rest of his days a secluded life of extreme regularity. If the character of his working life is to be understood, the conditions of ill-health under which he worked should never be forgotten. He bore his illness with such patience that even those most intimate with him hardly realised the amount of his habitual sufferings. But it is no exaggeration to say that for nearly forty years he did not know one day of the health of ordinary men, and that his life was one long struggle against the weariness and strain of sickness.
Down is a small village sixteen miles from London, of a few hundred inhabitants. It stands in a retired corner between the high roads to Westerham and Sevenoaks, on the undulating high land, five hundred and sixty feet above the sea, to the north of the great chalk escarpment above the Weald. Darwin describing it in a letter (1843) to his cousin, W. D. Fox, says: ‘Its chief merit is its extreme rurality. I think I never was in a more perfectly quiet country.’ He regarded it from the first as his home for life, and it ultimately took deep root in his affections. The house he described in 1842 as good but very ugly, and the garden was bleak and exposed. In later years, when the house had been altered and was clothed with creeping plants, and when the garden was sheltered by groups and banks of evergreens, the place became, in a quiet way, decidedly attractive. The first four years of the new life at Down were mainly occupied in writing the ‘Volcanic Islands,’ the ‘Geology of South America,’ and preparing for the Colonial and Home Library series a second edition (1845) of his ‘Journal,’ of which the first edition had been somewhat hampered by being published together with the narratives of Captains FitzRoy and King (1839).
In 1846 he began a special piece of zoological work, a monograph on the group of Cirripedes (barnacles), which occupied him until 1854, and the results of which were published by the Ray Society and by the Palæontographical Society in 1851 and 1854. The work on barnacles, besides being a com-
