Through experimentation he had discovered that a twining plant would not twine around an object larger than six inches in diameter. This characteristic Darwin interpreted as preventing a vine from climbing up a large tree where the shade from the upper branches would deprive it of sunlight.
Still interested in the mechanism that enables some plants to climb and bend, Darwin continued experimenting and pinpointed "some matter in the upper part which is acted upon by light, and which transmits its effects to the lower part." He reported these researches in The Power of Movement in Plants (1880).
A chance observation of flies caught on the leaf of the common sundew initiated Darwin's investigation of carnivorous plants. He was especially impressed by the fact that the living cells of plants possess a similar capacity for irritability and response as the cells of animals.
Darwin published these findings in Insectivorous Plants (1875).
In his last botanical work, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, which appeared only six months before his death in 1881, he demonstrated the service that worms perform in digesting leaves and recirculating organic matter. It was a pioneering study in the field of quantitative ecology.
Darwin worked alone at home, leading the life of an independent scientist (a privileged existence open to a fortunate few in Victorian England).
Money from Robert Darwin made it unnecessary for Charles to seek employment.
After his return from the voyage Darwin knew he would never become a clergyman like his mentor, Henslow. Nor would he remain a bachelor like his brother, Erasmus, who was a man-about-town.
After drawing up lists of the benefits and drawbacks of marriage, he proposed to his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, whom he married on Jan. 29, 1839. She brought fortune, devotion, and considerable housewifely skills that enabled him to work in peace for the next 40 years.
Newly married, the Darwins moved into a house on Gower Street in London, but within a few years Darwin's increasingly poor health prompted them to move to the country.
In 1842 the Darwins moved into Down House in the village of Downe, Kent, only 16 miles from London but remote from easy access to the city.
Charles and Emma Darwin had 10 children: two died in infancy and a third, Anne, died at age 10. The surviving five sons went away to school. George, Francis, and Horace became distinguished scientists, and Leonard, a major in the royal army, was an engineer and eugenicist. William Erasmus was undistinguished, as were his sisters, who prepared at home to follow their mother into marriage. Henrietta married; Elizabeth remained single at Down.
Darwin was devoted to his wife and daughters but treated them as children, obliging Emma to ask him for the only key to the drawers containing all the keys to cupboards and other locked depositories.
Darwin noted in The Descent that the young of both sexes resemble the adult female in most species and reasoned that males are more evolutionarily advanced than females.
His attitude toward women colored his scientific insights. "The female is less eager than the male," he wrote, "She is coy," and when she takes part in choosing a mate, she chooses "not the male which is most attractive to her, but the one which is least distasteful."
His medical school experience had left him sympathetic to the popular antivivisectionist movement, but he admonished women for their involvement in it in a letter to The Times of London on June 23, 1876:
All expressions of cruelty offended him, and he was an ardent opponent of slavery.
Comfortable in English society, Darwin treasured his place and feared alienating those who he knew would be offended by his theory. He benefited at the beginning of his career from the scientific fraternity in London, who helped him understand the specimens from the Beagle, and he appreciated his intellectual give and take with Henslow, Hooker, Lyell, and Huxley.
He was a beneficiary of this conservative English society, and his fear of ostracism was one of the forces that prevented him from publishing his theory sooner. He also dreaded the hurt he knew that his ideas would inflict on his close friend Henslow and especially on Emma, both devout Christians, for whom his theory was heresy.
The conflict between his science and his realization of what publication would imply for the society he was so much a part of manifested itself in physical pain. The once adventurous young naturalist was a semi-invalid before his 40th year.
Darwin's illness has been the subject of extensive speculation. Some of the symptoms--painful flatulence, vomiting, insomnia, palpitations--appeared in force as soon as he began his first transmutation notebook, in 1837.
Although he was exposed to insects in South America and could possibly have caught Chagas' or some other tropical disease, a careful analysis of the attacks in the context of his activities points to psychogenic origins.
Throughout the next decades Darwin's maladies waxed and waned. But during the last decade of his life, when he concentrated on botanical research and no longer speculated about evolution, he experienced the best health since his years at Cambridge.
Darwin made his home at Down into his laboratory, where he experimented in his garden and observed the local fauna. Dogs and cats were part of the Darwin household, which also was not without a child under school age between 1839 and 1856.
By no means a recluse, Darwin often attended scientific meetings in London; he was away from home for about 2,000 days between 1842 and 1881. He was a member of 57 leading foreign learned societies and was no less a prominent figure in the village of Downe, treasurer of the Friendly Club and a Justice of the Peace.
Darwin sent his children to village dances, and, even though he was a skeptical agnostic, he participated in church functions that were part of village life.
Darwin died at Down House on April 19, 1882. Within hours the news reached London, and a Parliamentary petition won him burial in Westminster Abbey.
By this time the theory of evolution through natural selection was generally accepted. His ideas were modified by later developments in genetics and molecular biology, but his work remains central to modern evolutionary theory.
- Encyclopedia Britannica
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