Скачать или смотреть A Visit to Darwin's House near Downe

I don't know exactly what I was expecting to see at Darwin's house near Downe. I had read the scholarly account of his life by Adrian Desmond and James Moore at least twenty years before. His study, of course, where the great man wrote his papers and books. The famous pebble walk with the forest he planted. Something inspirational; something personal? I went through the house where British Heritage has its shop with pleas for added donations. I shuttled through rooms crammed with displays and information, but the four rooms which affected me were: Darwin's Study (not a place where I could study or write); the large sitting room; Charles and Emma's bedroom (with a bay window overlooking the garden) where he would read to her on the four-poster bed; and the room with thier family tree displayed on a large poster.

However, it was not until I took the 'Sand Walk' and imagined Darwin walking there, that the whole experience came to life for me. The vivid moment was discovering that the 'Sand Walk' was actually a bed of stream-rounded flint pebbles. Darwin was walking on the cryptocrystalline evidence of sponges in the ancient ocean that formed the chalk beds of England and France and he didn't know it.