i7 



enlarged during the summer of 1844 into one of 230 pages, which I had 

 fairly copied out and still [1876] possess 1 ." 



Sept. 14. Settled at the village of Down in Kent. (Plate VII.) " My 

 life goes on like clockwork, and I am fixed on the spot where I shall end it." 



Darwin's house lies 18 miles from London, close to the village of 

 Down, which stands in a solitary upland country, 500 or 600 feet 

 above sea-level, — 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 a few hundred inhabitants, consists of three little streets of 

 cottages meeting by the flint-built church. It is a place where new-comers 

 are seldom seen, and where the names occurring in the old church registers 

 are still borne by the villagers. 



" Its chief merit is its extreme rurality. I think I was never in a 

 more perfectly quiet country." (1843.) 



The Sandwalk (Plate VIII) was planted by my father with a variety of 

 trees, such as hazel, alder, lime, hornbeam, birch, privet, and dogwood, and 

 with a long line of hollies all down the exposed side. Here he took a certain 

 number of turns every day, and used to count them by means of a heap 

 of flints, one of which he kicked aside each time he passed. The Sandwalk 

 was our play-ground as children, and here we continually saw my father as he 

 walked round. He liked to see what we were doing, and was ever ready to 

 sympathise in any fun that was going on. With regard to the Sandwalk, 

 in connection with our father, his children's earliest recollections coincide 

 with their latest, — so unchanging were his habits. 



Adapted from Francis Darwin's Reminiscences in Life and Letters. 



Publication of The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs ; being 

 Part I. of the Geology of the Voyage of the Beagle. 



" I wish that some doubly rich millionaire would take it into his head 

 to have borings made in some of the Pacific and Indian atolls, and bring 

 home cores for slicing from a depth of 500 or 600 feet." C. Darwin, 1881. 



" Though the ' doubly rich millionaire ' has not been forthcoming, the 

 energy, in England, of Professor Sollas, and in New South Wales of 

 Professor Anderson Stuart, served to set on foot a project, which, aided at 

 first by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and after- 

 wards taken up jointly by the Royal Society, the New South Wales 

 Government, and the Admiralty, has led to the most definite and conclusive 



1 A Volume containing both these Essays will be published by the Cambridge University 

 Press in June of this year, 



