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Evening Standard Reporter

CHARLES DARWIN, author of the "Origin of Species," made the Kent village Downe world-famous by living there for 40 years, up to his death in 1882. To-day, there is little there which he would not recognise.

His house owned now by the British Association and open to visitors—is, externally, unchanged, and, inside, the study where he wrote his famous work is just as he left it 37 years ago—his books on the shelves, his chair and the board which he rested on his knees to write upon, and even a model of little white terrier, Pollie, curled up on her basket at his feet.

The management of the garden is the same. He would find still in its place on the lawn the "worm stone" which he put there to study the subsidence effects of worm castings. On the gravel path, bees, intoxicated by the fruit of the lime trees still as in his time, fly drunkenly about till the night chill kills them, leaving hundreds of bodies to be swept up in the morning.

SAME SHOP NAMES

The same names figure over the village ships where he would stop and chat with the tradespeople.

"I can see him now, said Mr Bradley Osborne the butcher, speaking with knife in hand over a prime joint. "My father served his home with meat. As a boy I often stood at the door and watched the old gentleman being wheeled past in his bathchair by old Parslow his butler."

Among half a dozen others in the village old enough to remember him are Robert Hills, his gardener, the only servant whom Darwin allowed to enter his sacred study, and George Sales, born in Downe, whose uncle married Darwin's cook when the latter was 60.

"Many a cup of tea and piece of cake I've had from Mr. Darwin," says Mr. Sales. "He used to have us boys in to weed his garden. He was a magistrate, and I remember how troubled he was once when he had to punish some boys who had robbed his orchard.

STAY IN THE HOUSE

"'I do wish the police hadn't caught them' he said to me."

For a week young George Sales lived under the same roof as Darwin, because George's father, then, kept the Queen's Head, and when Darwin first came to the village he put up there while Down House was being got ready.

"Yes, and he walked all the way from London beside the furniture van—16 miles, added Mr. Sales. It is eloquent of how little Downe has changed that all laps, which lighted the Queen's Head then, were still in use there up to two years ago, when electricity first come to the village.

There was no drainage system till less than a year ago.

Nor is there much likelihood of Downe, though only 16 miles form London Bridge, losing its unique rusticity for years to come.

ON A BYWAY

It lies on a byroad between two main roads, four miles from a railway station, protected by the Green Bell, private estates, the toll came and Biggin Hill airfield. Time seems to have left it lovingly alone, and in its placid atmosphere there is no incongruity about the old-world language on the tombstone facing the village centre, commemorating one James Fountaine. It reads:

"He was devoted by his Father's Wishes and his own to the Ministry, but God has withdrawn him to an early rest in his 20th year. His seizure was sudden but not unawares, he was allowed to utter one compendious sermon. Thursday saw him cheerful and grateful for health: Saturday, 6 August, 1828, a pale corpse."

The visitor imagines Darwin, with his vast literary output, pausing to meditate on the tragic fate of a parson silenced after only one compendious sermon.