66 CHARLES DARWIN 



servants who came beneath his roof stopped there for 

 the most part during their whole lifetime. In his 

 earlier years at Down, the quiet Kentish home was 

 constantly enlivened by the visits of men like Lyell, 

 Huxley, Hooker, Lubbock, and Wollaston. During his 

 later days, it was the Mecca of a world-wide scientific 

 and philosophic pilgrimage, where all the greatest men 

 our age has produced sought at times the rare honour 

 of sitting before the face of the immortal master. But 

 to the very last Darwin himself never seemed to dis- 

 cover that he was anything more than just an average 

 man of science among his natural peers. 



Shortly after Darwin went to Down he began one 

 long and memorable experiment, which in itself casts a 

 flood of light upon his patient and painstaking method 

 of inquiry. Two years before, he had read at the Geo- 

 logical Society a paper on the ' Formation of Mould,' 

 which more than thirty years later he expanded into 

 his famous treatise on the 'Action of Earthworms.' 

 His uncle and father-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood, sug- 

 gested to him that the apparent sinking of stones on 

 the surface might really be due to earthworm castings. 

 So, as soon as he had some land of his own to experi- 

 ment upon, he began, in 1842, to spread broken chalk 

 over a field at Down, in which, twenty-nine years later, 

 in 1871, a trench was dug to test the results. What 

 other naturalist ever waited so long and so patiently to 

 discover the upshot of a single experiment ? Is it wonder- 

 ful that a man who worked like that should succeed, not 

 by faith but by logical power, in removing mountains ? 



Unfortunately, we do not know the exact date when 

 Darwin first read Malthus. But that the perusal of 



