Westminster Abbey » Charles Darwin Burial Date: 26 Apr, 1882 Field: Scientist; writer Location in the Abbey: Nave, north choir aisle Type of memorial: Grave; bust Type of material: Bronze Charles Robert Darwin, naturalist, is buried in the north aisle of the nave of Westminster Abbey, not far from Sir Isaac Newton . He was born in Shrewsbury on 12 February 1809, son of Robert Waring Darwin (1766-1848) and Susannah, daughter of Josiah Wedgwood. He studied with his brother Erasmus at Edinburgh University but disliked the idea of following in his father's footsteps as a doctor. At Cambridge University he became very much interested in natural history and sailed on the ship HMS Beagle in 1831 to South America and the Galapagos islands. In 1839 he married his cousin Emma Wedgwood and they went to live at Downe, a small village in Kent. His famous work "The Origin of Species by natural selection" was published in 1859 and he continued working although his health was often poor.

He died at Down House on 19 April 1882. Burial The Dean of Westminster, George Granville Bradley, was away in France when he received a telegram forwarded from the President of the Royal Society in London saying "…it would be acceptable to a very large number of our fellow-countrymen of all classes and opinions that our illustrious countryman, Mr Darwin, should be buried in Westminster Abbey". The Dean recalled " I did not hesitate as to my answer and telegraphed direct…that my assent would be cheerfully given". The body lay overnight in the Abbey, in the small chapel of St Faith, and on the morning of 26 April the coffin was escorted by the family and eminent mourners into the Abbey. The pall-bearers included Sir Joseph Hooker, Alfred Russel Wallace , James Russell Lowell (U.S. Ambassador), and William Spottiswoode (President of the Royal Society). The burial service was held in the Lantern, conducted by Canon Prothero, with anthems sung by the choir.

The chief mourners then followed the coffin into the north aisle of the Nave where Darwin was buried next to the eminent scientist Sir John Herschel, and a few feet away from Sir Isaac Newton. The simple inscription on his gravestone, which is of pale Carrara marble, reads "CHARLES ROBERT DARWIN BORN 12 FEBRUARY 1809. DIED 19 APRIL 1882". Although an agnostic, Darwin was greatly respected by his contemporaries and the Bishop of Carlisle, Harvey Goodwin, in a memorial sermon preached in the Abbey on the Sunday following the funeral, said "I think that the interment of the remains of Mr Darwin in Westminster Abbey is in accordance with the judgment of the wisest of his countrymen…It would have been unfortunate if anything had occurred to give weight and currency to the foolish notion which some have diligently propagated, but for which Mr Darwin was not responsible, that there is a necessary conflict between a knowledge of Nature and a belief in God…". A later, widely believed, rumour of a "deathbed conversion" to Christianity was denied by his daughter, who was actually present at his death.

Memorial bust A bronze memorial, with a life-sized relief bust, was erected by his family in the north choir aisle, near to the grave, in 1888. The sculptor was Sir J.E. Boehm. The inscription just says simply DARWIN. Photos of the grave and memorial can be purchased from Westminster Abbey Library Further reading: AboutDarwin.com - Darwin's Burial Charles Robert Darwin died on April 19, 1882 at around 4:00 in the afternoon at his home in Kent. His funeral was held on April 26 on a Wednesday at Westminster Abbey. It was attended by scientists, philosophers, naturalists, admirals, and dignitaries of all sorts. Among the thousands of people attending his funeral were Joseph Parslow, his servant and lifetime friend, as well as Mrs. Evens, the household cook.

The pall bearers at Darwin's funeral were: George Campbell - The 9th Duke of Argyll William Cavendish - The 7th Duke of Devonshire Edward Henry Stanley - The 15th Earl of Derby James Russell Lowell - The American Ambassador to Britain William Spottiswoode - Mathematician, physicist, the Queen's Printer, and friend of Darwin Joseph Dalton Hooker - Darwin's close friend and champion of his Theory of Evolution Thomas Henry Huxley - Darwin's close friend and champion of his Theory of Evolution Alfred Russel Wallace - Darwin's friend and the co-founder of Natural Selection Sir John Lubbock - The 1st Baron of Avebury, Darwin's next door neighbor and close friend Here is a map that shows how to find Westminster Abbey in London, England: Contrary to popular belief, Charles Darwin was not buried next to Isaac Newton. As you can see on the map below, however, he was buried very close to Newton. Darwin was actually buried next to his good friend Sir John Herschel. The zoomed-in circle shows whose graves or memorial plaques are near Charles Darwin: 1 = Charles Darwin (grave) Is it Real?

| Crazy Stuff | Science | History | Mystery | Quest for God | Journalism Why is it fitting that Charles Darwin is buried in Westminster Abbey? It may seem ironic that both Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell are buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey, formally known as London’s Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster. They are there, honored in particular for their accomplishments in science. It is fitting, for they have had as so much influence on modern Christian theology just as they have had on modern science. Nature, in an editorial (October, 2009), commented on reactions to Darwin. In England, for example, the Church reacted badly to Darwin’s theory, going so far as to say that to believe it was to imperil your soul. But the notion that Darwin’s ideas ‘killed’ God and were a threat to religion was by no means the universal response in the nineteenth century. . . . [F]rom Egypt to India, China and Japan, many religious scholars embraced Darwin's ideas, often showing how their own schools of thought had anticipated the notion of evolution. -Editorial from Nature, Volume 461 Number 7268 It is true: some in the Church reacted badly.

This was particularly so in the Church of England, part of the Anglican Communion. This is "the Church,” in particular, to which the editors of Nature were is seems referring. But the editors of Nature overstated what happened. Darwin’s theory was more of a culture shock than a religious shock. The distinction is important. It was more about resistance to change than an inability to accommodate evolution within Christianity. Darwin, after a choral funeral service in the Abbey, was buried in a prominent place in the church’s nave at the request of William Spottiswoode, the president of the Royal Society, Britain’s academy of science. The suggestion was warmly welcomed. Darwin, truly a humble agnostic, was very much admired, and his theory accepted by many in the church including, Harvey Goodwin, the bishop of Carlisle, who on the Sunday following Darwin’s funeral in a sermon preached in the abbey, said: It would have been unfortunate if anything had occurred to give weight and currency to the foolish notion which some have diligently propagated, but for which Mr Darwin was not responsible, that there is a necessary conflict between a knowledge of Nature and a belief in God….

Evolution: Darwin: Darwin's Diary Darwin's Diary April 1882 (Darwin's Struggle with Faith) On Wednesday, April 26, 1882, the body of Charles Darwin is laid to rest in Westminster Abbey. Initially Darwin was to be buried near his family home in the countryside. After persuading Emma, Darwin's scientific friends lobbied for a place in Westminster Abbey. The London papers chimed in; one editorial urged, "His proper place is amongst those other worthies whose reputations are landmarks in the people's history, and if it should not clash with his own expressed wishes, or the pious feelings of the family, we owe it to posterity to place his remains ... among the illustrious dead." Britain's leading politicians, scientists, and clergy have tickets to the funeral. The doors are also open to the public at large, and the Abbey is packed with mourners. "The nation's grandest temple of religion opened its gates and lifted up its everlasting doors and bade the king of science come in." Countless tributes, like the one above from a Unitarian preacher, reflect the profound change that has taken place in Britain in the decades since On the Origin of Species was published.

Now, the Church of England and society at large no longer see evolution as anathema to faith. Darwin himself stressed that evolution and religion were not incompatible. He pointed to his dear friend Asa Gray, who fought to have the theory of natural selection accepted in America, as an example of "an ardent theist and an evolutionist." Yet Darwin knew that he himself lacked the comfort of a steady faith. In some of his last words, he wrote "A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life ... only to follow those impulses and instincts ... which seem to him the best ones ... I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to science." As Darwin's coffin is carried through the Abbey, white-robed choristers sing a hymn composed for the occasion, with words adapted from the Book of Proverbs. "Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding.

"She is more precious than rubies: and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her." As the coffin is lowered, in a place of honor near a monument to Sir Isaac Newton, the choir sings "His body is buried in peace, but his name liveth evermore." The Times/1882/Editorial/Burial of Charles Darwin - Wikisource, the free online library The Times/1882/Editorial/Burial of Charles Darwin From Wikisource Source: Editorial. The Times, Wednesday, Apr 26, 1882; Issue 30491; pg. 11; col F 369204Editorial: Burial of Charles Darwin1882 When a celebrated Englishman dies the world is accustomed to hear a loud demand that his body shall be buried at Westminster Abbey . The illustrious writer, the general, the statesman, has commonly been surrounded in life by a band of admirers. They compare him dead with famous occupants of the Minster, and insist that his achievements equal theirs. Entombment in Westminster Abbey has become a standard by which great men's great deeds and their vitality are measured.

Sometimes the movement which conveys the dead to their historic sepulchre is less a continuation of the honour paid in life than a spasm of remorse for its meagreness. A generation not rarely testifies to its tardy discovery that it had a prophet in its midst by the self-accusing splendour of funeral solemnities. For the masses the desire to inter at Westminster the remains of a popular hero is the same sentiment which enshrines in a Cathedral the relics of a saint. There is the material instinct that death is not wholly death while the flesh and bones of the genius or the warrior are laid up in the national sanctuary. It is characteristic of the man that when Charles Darwin died no requisition of a place for him within the straitened bounds of the Abbey witnessed to any of these various emotions on his behalf. His disciples were conscious of no need to vindicate his glory, and to challenge comparison. It was enough that on earth from one end to the other joined to proclaim his praises.

A season there had been when antagonists of conclusions they themselves chose to draw from his passionless array of facts might have felt his premature death stir in them a wish to make amends for baseless invectives by burying the sufferer in pomp. That period has long gone by. He and his theories alike have lived down personal hostility. Popular enthusiasm loves to link a lofty name with material associations. It buries the objects of its worship at Westminster that it may remind itself not so much of their works s how and in what circumstances they accomplished them. The career of Charles Darwin eludes the grasp of personal curiosity as much of personal enmity. he thought, and his thoughts have passed into the substance of facts of the universe. A grass plot, a plant in bloom, a human gesture, the entire circle of the doings and tendencies of nature, builds his monument and records his exploits. Yet it is equally characteristic of him whose mortal remains are to be deposited this morning in the Abbey that the decision to place them in it awakened no surprise, and hardly a comment. They would have rested not inharmoniously under the tall elms in the quiet churchyard of Down.

They could rest nowhere so fitly as among the brotherhood of English worthies at Westminster. By every title which can claim a corner in that sacred earth, the body of Charles Darwin should be there. Conquerors lie there who had added rich and vast territories to their native empire. Charles Darwin has, perhaps, borne the flag of science farther, certainly he has planted its standard more deeply, than any Englishman since Newton . He has done more than extend the boundaries of science, he has established new centres whence annexations of fresh and fruitful truths are sure continually to be made. The Abbey has its orators and Ministers who have convinced reluctant senates and swayed nations. Not one of them all has wielded a power over man and their intelligences more complete than that which for the last twenty-three years has emanated from a simple country house in Kent. Memories of poets breath about the mighty church, Sciences invokes the aid of imagination no less than poetry. Darwin as he searched imagined. Every microscopic fact his patient eyes unearthed, his fancy caught up and set in its proper niche in a fabric as stately and grand as ever the creative company of Poet's Corner wove from sunbeams and rainbows.

If toil for humanity be the test of rightful acceptance in the British Campo Santo, half a century of loving labour in the cause of truth bears unanswerable witness for him. If unanimity of recognition be a condition of admittance to a distinction which should be awarded freely and frankly if at all, none in the army of renowned dead at Westminster can boast a more absolute and universal assent. The whole civilized world has arrogated a right to extol and lament Darwin with a sense almost of appropriation of his work and his genius which would sting the heart of England could England reproach itself, as happily it cannot, with shortcomings in its tribute of affection. One point alone, indeed, is missing to match the funeral pageant of t-day with the chief which have wound their triumphant though sad through the Abbey aisles. Death seals cynical lips and appeases or lulls party malignity. Only once in history of the Abbey has the note of public grief for a famous life ended been jarred by vengeful protests. But seldom have the careers which close under the Abbey roof amidst a chorus of national gratitude and praise won the crown without having stood at the stake. Biographies of the glorious tenants of Abbey tombs are for the most part bitter reading.

The men have fought a hard fight, and have come out of the battle not always unstained. Had Darwin died when the attacks upon him were fiercest, his mourners would yet not have had to lament that enmity and anger had soured, or clouded even for an instant, his bright and wholesome mind. Except for the touch of bodily infirmity, which was not all loss, Westminster Abbey has never given its final impress of national veneration to seventy-three years more unsullied by the dints and smoke and fury of life's conflicts as well as more abounding in its victories. The moment the though arose, not, apparently, in any single mind, but spontaneously and everywhere, that the body of the great naturalist ought to be buried at Westminster, it was felt that the Abbey needed it more than it needed the Abbey. The Abbey tombs are a compendium of English deeds and intellect. The line would have been incomplete without the epoch-making name of Darwin. How long the era he opened will last none can tell. Veins of thought supposed to be of inexhaustible wealth sometimes fail. It is still less possible to predict that a larger law may not sooner or later embrace and merge that of evolution itself.

But it is no rash assertion that the facts must survive, and something more than the facts, which Darwin spent his happy life in collecting. He accumulated facts, and he will have taught posterity how to accumulate them. Should the theories which he inferred from facts as he knew them ever become subordinate or obsolete, it will be in virtue of discoveries made through the method he used and enthroned. The horizon he beheld may widen or contract; no increase in the facilities for observing nature or enlargement of the range of physical knowledge is likely to disprove the value of his method, or render it possible to view some departments of nature except under the aspect in which they revealed themselves to him. This work was published before January 1, 1923, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago. Steve Jones explores the obscure chapters of Charles Darwin's life | Science | The Guardian Charles Darwin 'We ought to be exterminated' It's 200 years since the birth of Charles Darwin, one of the greatest scientists of all time and the man who came up with the theory of evolution. His adventures on HMS Beagle have been well chronicled.

But the obscure chapters of his life are equally fascinating - such as his marriage to his cousin Emma, and his fears that inbreeding was the cause of their children's chronic ill health. In an exclusive extract from his new book, Steve Jones tells the story of Darwin's private agony Darwin's study at Down House. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe Steve Jones Share on Messenger Close Charles Darwin , as every schoolchild knows, saw the finches of the Galapagos in the years he spent there while employed as official naturalist on HMS Beagle. Each island had its own species, and Darwin soon worked out that they shared descent from a common ancestor; that they were a product of evolution. On his return to England he at once published his theory in his book The Origin of Species, which went on to prove that men had descended from chimpanzees. Nature, red in tooth and claw, had used the survival of the fittest to weed out the imperfect and, with Homo sapiens at the top of the evolutionary tree, had achieved her desired end. Racked by guilt at replacing the doctrines of the Church with a joyless vision of man as a shaven primate in an amoral universe, Darwin retired into obscurity.

He repented his blasphemy on his deathbed and was buried as a venerable and almost forgotten savant whose work - like that of so many famous scientists - had been completed while he was still a young man. That is a distortion of the truth. Darwin was not a hired biologist but paid for his own trip as gentleman-companion to the Beagle's captain. He spent but five weeks of the five-year voyage in the Galapagos, with just half that time passed on shore, on only four of the dozen or so members of the group of islands. He had little interest in his collection of finches and lumped their corpses together as a jumbled mass without even making a note of where they came from. Many of the famous birds live on several islands rather than one. Two decades passed before the publication of The Origin of Species (in which the word "evolution" does not appear) and in that time its author wrote several substantial books. The phrase "the survival of the fittest" is not his but was coined by the philosopher Herbert Spencer to summarise the notion of natural selection, the central element of evolutionary theory.

The bloody fangs and fingernails of mother nature were themselves thought up by Tennyson a decade earlier not as a philosophy of life but in memory of the death of a friend. Evolution has no end in view and men do not descend from chimps, although the two share a common ancestor. The Church soon accommodated Darwin's ideas, which, as most clerics realised, have no relevance to religion, and the deathbed conversion is a simple falsehood, even if the great naturalist was buried in Westminster Abbey, where he still lies, trampled by tourists. The most widespread error, however, is to assume that the Beagle voyage marked the end of Darwin's scientific career. In fact, in the four decades that remained to him after he came home in 1836, he worked as hard as or harder than he had in his 20s. After marrying in 1839, just short of his 30th birthday, he purchased Down House, south of London, settled in the land of his birth and never left again, uxorious, paternal and reluctant to abandon his extensive garden except on forays to test his theories and, now and again, to search for better health.

So settled was he that he described his profession as "farmer" in the Bagshawe's Directory of the time. Great Britain was the first and last of the 40 islands he visited, and Darwin studied its inhabitants - plant, animal, human - in far more detail than he had those of anywhere else. Even his own family was not immune. Charles Darwin had worried about his plans for marriage. Perhaps the whole idea was a mistake because of the time that would be wasted on domestic life at the expense of science. His diary records how he agonised over the pros and cons, and his decision to "Marry, marry, marry!" And marry, in the end, he did. His spouse was his cousin, Emma Wedgwood. In falling for a relative he stuck to a clan tradition. The Darwins, like many among the Victorian upper crust, had long preferred to share a bed with their kin. Charles's grandfather Josiah Wedgwood set up home with his third cousin Sarah Wedgwood. Their daughter, Susannah, chose Robert Darwin, Charles's father. Charles's uncle - Emma's father - had nine offspring, four of whom married cousins.

The evolutionist's own marriage was in the end happy, with 10 children (and when his wife was in her 40s he wrote that "Emma has been very neglectful of late for we have not had a child for more than one whole year"). Even so, in Queen Victoria's fecund days the Darwin-Wedgwood dynasty did less well than most, for among the 62 uncles, cousins and aunts (Emma and Charles included) who descended from Josiah, 38 had no progeny that survived to adulthood. Six years after his wife's last confinement Darwin began to think about the dangers of inbreeding, in particular as they applied to his own choice of spouse. His concern was picked up from another of his cousins, Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, who had pointed out the potential dangers of marriage within the clan. Darwin was anxious about his children. His 10th and last, Charles the younger, died while a baby; he was "backward in walking & talking, but intelligent and observant".

Henrietta had a digestive illness not unlike that of her father, who was prone to stress-induced vomiting, and took to her bed for years, and he feared that his son Leonard was "rather slow and backward" (which did not prevent his later marriage to his own cousin or his acceptance of the presidency of the Eugenics Society), while Horace had "attacks, many times a day, of shuddering & gasping & hysterical sobbing, semi-convulsive movements, with much distress of feeling". His second daughter, Elizabeth, "shivers & makes as many extraordinary grimaces as ever". George's problem was an irregular pulse, which hinted at "some deep flaw in his constitution" and, worst of all, his beloved Annie expired at the age of 10, throwing her parents into despair. As he wrote, "When we hear it said that a man carries in his constitution the seeds of an inherited disease there is much literal truth in the expression." Once he even wrote to a friend that, "We are a wretched family & ought to be exterminated." Might his own illness and that of his sons and daughters be due to his own and his ancestors' choice of a relative as life-partner?

Was inbreeding a universal threat? His first statement of concern came in 1862 as an afterword to his book On the Various Contrivances By Which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised By Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing. The last paragraph of that hefty work, most of it devoted to botanical minutiae, ends: "Nature thus tells us, in the most emphatic manner, that she abhors perpetual self-fertilisation ... May we not further infer as probable, in accordance with the belief of the vast majority of the breeders of our domestic productions, that marriage between near relatives is likewise in some way injurious?" The idea that children born to related parents might suffer harm was already in the air. The first study of its risks came in 1851 when Sir William Wilde (father of Oscar) found an increased incidence of deafness among the progeny of cousins.

Sir Arthur Mitchell, the deputy commissioner in lunacy for Scotland, had earlier claimed that in the inbred fishing communities of north-east Scotland the average hat size was six and seven-eighths, a quarter-inch less than that of their more open-minded agricultural neighbours: proof, he thought, of the malign effects of the marriage of kin upon the mental powers. Sex within the household has a venerable history. The Pharaohs lived through generations of the habit in an attempt to preserve the bloodline of a god. Akhenaten, who lived around 1,300BC, first married his cousin Nefertiti, then a lesser wife, Kiya, and then three of his own daughters by Nefertiti and then (perhaps) his own mother. The story is confused by difficulties with sorting out quite who was who (and one of his supposed wives was in fact male), but incestuous affairs were without doubt common in ancient Egypt. Cleopatra herself may have been the scion of 10 generations of brother-sister unions.

The practice is condemned in Leviticus, where the Children of Israel were enjoined that, "After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do." The belief that the children of cousins are bound to be unfit still fuels a jaundiced view of sex within the household. In 2008, a British government minister, in reference to the Pakistani population of Bradford, made the quite unjustified claim: "If you have a child with your cousin, the likelihood is there will be a genetic problem." Many of his fellow citizens share that vague Galtonian sense that inbreeding is harmful. Most of their alarm, however, rests on anecdote rather than on science. All nations are interested in how their members behave in the bedroom. In the US, for example, every one of the states has some restriction on marriage between relatives. As for England, for years it based its marital rules on those of the Church of England, which descend from those of the Israelites. In 1907, after hundreds of hours of parliamentary discussion, the statutes were at last clarified.

The new legislation removed absurd anomalies such as the biologically senseless law that forbade a widower to marry his dead wife's sister, but it also firmed up the prohibition against sex with close kin, be it father with daughter, or brother with sister. Politicians often act on prejudice. Darwin did not. When faced with a scientific question - about sex or anything else - he set out not to speculate but to discover. To learn more about inbreeding, he turned again to plants. The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom, which appeared in 1876, when Darwin was 67, chronicles his experiments in the Down House greenhouse, forcing a wide variety of hermaphrodite plants to mate with themselves. With the help of a botanical condom - a fine mesh to keep out insects - and a small paintbrush he could, like a bee, move male cells to the female parts of a flower and arrange for the plant to receive its own genes, or those of another individual. Certain species failed to self-fertilise, even when obliged to try, but among those that did, he discovered - somewhat to his alarm - that the habit did damage later generations.

His initial experiments were on toadflax, a common yellow-flowered weed. When self-pollination occured, Darwin soon found a large, and unexpected, effect upon the next generation. The progeny of such crosses were smaller and less vigorous than were those of plants allowed to mate with another. At first he supposed that his inbred offspring were weak because of some disease, or because they were grown in unsuitable soil. That was not so, for however well they were treated they stayed feeble. Darwin ran through a variety of species - carnations, tobacco, peas, monkey-flowers, morning glory, foxgloves and many other garden and wildflowers. With statistical help from Galton he discovered that, almost without exception, those grown from crossed seed were taller, healthier and more productive than those from self-fertilised. Some experiments went on for several generations, and the effects of sex with a relative got worse with time. The inbreds suffered most of all when life was hard: when they were crowded, had to compete with their "outcrossed" kin or were moved from the greenhouse to the rigours of the open air.

Darwin's verdict was clear: "Cross-fertilisation is generally beneficial, and self-fertilisation injurious." It was "as unmistakably plain that innumerable flowers are adapted for cross-fertilisation, as that the teeth and talons of a carnivorous animal are adapted for catching prey". What was true of plants must, he imagined, apply to animals, men and women included. More recent research confirms that view. When wild mice are mated, brother with sister, and the offspring released into nature, almost none survive. Inbred animals do not often die of obvious genetic disease, but their parenthood can much weaken them. Song sparrows on a small island off Canada's west coast have been ringed for years and their pedigrees worked out in detail. Those born to close relatives are at more risk of death in bad weather than are other birds. The island of Soay is famous for its native sheep, which have been there since Viking times. The animals are filled with worms, and those with the heaviest burden suffer most of all during a vicious Scottish winter. Lambs born to close relatives have more parasites, and are at more risk of death in storms, than others.

The finches on the Galapagos also pay the price for sex with close relatives, as do many other creatures. It is, of course, impossible to carry out planned crosses with men and women, but Darwin came up with another way to test the dangers of inbreeding. First, he tried to get questions about cousin matrimony included in the 1871 census. The Commons threw out the request as "the grossest cruelty", for it would cause children to be "anatomised by science" (and from a parliamentary point of view the issue was almost traitorous, for the Queen had wed her cousin). A query about "lunatics, imbeciles and idiots" was allowed but dropped for the next census a decade later as most people refused to answer it. Darwin was annoyed by his failure to persuade parliament to ask a scientific question and complained about "ignorant members of our legislature". His son George was even more caustic about "the scornful laughter of the House, on the ground that the idle curiosity of philosophers was not to be satisfied". George Darwin set out to build on his father's work.

From the records of Burke's Landed Gentry and the Pall Mall Gazette, together with a circular sent to lunatic asylums, he worked out the frequency of cousin marriage in various groups. Such unions transpired to be twice as common among noblemen as the proletariat. His inquiry to the superintendents of asylums as to how many of those in their care were the scions of related parents was, as they pointed out, unlikely to pay off because of the mental state of their charges. Even so, George found no increase in the level of inbreeding among the patients compared with that of the general population (even if the deputy commissioner in lunacy for Scotland did assure him that most of his nation's idiots were the children of relatives). After his mixed success with lunatics, the young man went on to study the inmates of Oxford and Cambridge colleges. He chose the boat-race crews - "a picked body of athletic men" - and asked how many had been born of cousins. After a correction for a falsified answer from the stroke of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, he found that there was indeed a slight shortage of such inbred individuals among top oarsmen compared with the general population.

The same was true among sporting boys in the principal schools for the upper and middle classes. In both cases the numbers were small and the evidence not altogether persuasive. The failure with the census, and his son's ambiguous results, suggested to Darwin that perhaps the effects of human inbreeding were less dire than he had feared. He removed his comment on its harmful effects from the second edition of the orchids book. By then he had also revealed some of the ways in which nature reduces the chances of interbreeding. The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species, published a year after the volume on self-fertilisation, tells the story of the children of Darwin's home village of Downe, who made necklaces from cowslips. They could, they told him, use just a few of the plants, those with a long "pin" that protruded from the flower, through which they could thread the plants together. Other flowers, instead of a pin, had no more than a short protrusion called a "thrum" and were of no use as juvenile jewellery. The cowslip's close relative, the primrose, was much the same.

Female "pin" flowers were, Darwin found, much happier to accept pollen from male "thrums" than they were from males of their own kind. The same applied in the opposite direction. The flower's form is inherited - which means that the plants decide whether or not to accept another's pollen advances on genetic grounds. With pins and thrums, Nature has come up with a trick to reduce the proportion of individuals with whom genes can be shared. She has, in effect, invented more and more sexes - or at least, added more and more papers to the sexual exam. Darwin's experiments on cowslips have grown into a science that shows how, in both primroses and people, partners are chosen in unexpected ways and the choice may reduce the prospects of successful mating between those who have recent ancestors in common. In human families, for example, the idea of sex with a brother or sister is generally less repellent to a younger sibling than to an older. The degree of kinship is the same, but the older child can be almost certain that the junior members of the household are the products of their own mother, for they saw them cared for as babies.

A younger sibling, on the other hand, knows only that an older individual lives under the same roof - which could happen for other reasons. They are less appalled by the idea of sex with somebody who might not, after all, be a relative. Where close inbreeding does occur, studies have confirmed Darwin's belief that it can impose a real burden. Even in places without high levels of inborn disease, children born to cousins die younger than usual. Such unions in Utah Mormons - not themselves an unusually inbred population - from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries led to a notable increase in ill health. The effects became worse as the infants grew older, perhaps because death in old age has a stronger genetic component than do the accidents of infection or starvation that killed the pioneers' babies. Heart disease is also more frequent among the children of cousins. A study of half a million pregnancies in modern America suggests that the death rate of the sons and daughters of cousins rises by about 5% above average. The products of uncle-niece marriages, a pattern frequent in India and elsewhere, do even worse and while incest - sex between siblings, or parents and children - is rare, the offspring pay a high price.

A German brother and sister, adopted at birth and strangers until they met as adults, had four children, two of whom were severely affected. A study of 30 or so Canadian children born to such parents also suggests that almost half inherit some abnormality, and the same was true in the recent case of father-daughter incest in Sheffield. A more subtle, but more marked, effect of within-family sex has emerged in Iceland. Among 150,000 couples born between 1800 and 1965, partners who were close relatives had more, rather than fewer, children than average. Even so, the proportion of the children of first and second cousins who themselves reproduced (and hence the number of grandchildren born to the pair of relatives) was well below average, in part because many of those first-generation progeny died young. Charles Darwin and his cousin Emma may have been testimony to that effect, for seven of their 10 sons and daughters expired before their time or lived on but stayed childless. Close mating may be more harmful to a family's prospects than was once supposed. And yet the great man's concern about his children was not entirely justified. Of his sons, William became a banker and Leonard an army major.

George was elected professor of astronomy and Francis reader in botany at Cambridge, while Horace set up as a scientific-instrument maker and was for a time mayor of that fair city. The naturalist's offspring married into several eminent clans including those of Keynes and Huxley. And, in spite of their progenitor's concerns about inherited feebleness, they have produced dozens of descendants eminent in science, medicine and the professions. Inbreeding certainly has an effect on human health, but in parts of India the children of cousins are actually healthier than others because cousin marriages are more common in families with at least some money. They are anxious to keep it in the family line, whereas the destitute have nothing to pass on. In just the same way the success of Darwin's descendants depends much more on their intellectual heritage than on their DNA. As so often in evolution, the simple rules that drive the world of nature are confused or suspended when we try to apply them naively to ourselves. © Steve Jones 2009. Extracted from Darwin's Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England by Steve Jones, published by Little, Brown on 29 January at £20.

To order a copy for £18 with free UK p&p go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846. Charles Robert Darwin (1809 - 1882) - Find A Grave Memorial Downe Greater London, England English Naturalist, Scientist, and Philosopher. He is best remembered for his book "On the Origin of Species," published in 1859, that established all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. While controversial, due to its departure from the religious view of creationism, by the 1870s the scientific community and much of the general public had accepted evolution as a fact. He was born the fifth of six children in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England at his family home, The Mount. His father was a wealthy society doctor and financier, and both sides of his family were Unitarians.

In July 1818, when he was eight years old, his mother died and the following September he attended the Anglican Shrewsbury School with his older brother Erasmus as a boarder. He spent the summer of 1825 as an apprentice doctor, helping his father treat the poor of Shropshire, before going to the University of Edinburgh Medical School in October of that year, which at the time was the best medical school in Scotland. He found lectures dull and surgery distressing, so neglected his studies and turned his attention to nature. Which he found more fascinating. In 1826 he joined the Plinian Society, a student natural history group whose debates strayed into radical materialism. He assisted Robert Edmond Grant's investigations of the anatomy and life cycle of marine invertebrates in the Firth of Forth, Scotland, and in March 1827 presented at the Plinian his own discovery that black spores found in oyster shells were the eggs of a skate leech. The neglect of his medical studies annoyed his father, who sent him to Christ's College in Cambridge, England, for a Bachelor of Arts degree as the first step towards becoming an Anglican minister.

He was unqualified for the Tripos, so he joined the ordinary degree course in January 1828. His cousin William Darwin Fox introduced him to the popular craze for beetle collecting, which he pursued zealously, getting some of his finds published in Stevens' "Illustrations of British Entomology." He became a close friend and follower of botany professor John Stevens Henslow and met other leading naturalists who saw scientific work as religious natural theology, becoming known as "the man who walks with Henslow". When his own exams drew near, he focused on his studies and was delighted by the language and logic of William Paley's "Evidences of Christianity." In his final examination in January 1831, he did well, coming tenth out of 178 candidates for the ordinary degree. He remained at Cambridge until June 1831, studying books on natural philosophy. In August 1831 he received a letter from Henslow, proposing him as a suitable gentleman naturalist for a self-funded temporary place on the HMS Beagle with Captain Robert FitzRoy, more as a companion than a mere collector.

The ship was to leave in four weeks on an expedition to chart the coastline of South America. His father objected to his son's planned two-year voyage, regarding it as a waste of time, but was persuaded by his brother-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood, to agree to (and fund) his son's participation. After delays, the voyage finally departed Plymouth, England on December 27, 1831 and lasted almost five years. He spent most of that time on land investigating geology and making natural history collections, while the Beagle surveyed and charted coasts. He kept careful notes of his observations and theoretical speculations, and at intervals during the voyage his specimens were sent to Cambridge together with letters including a copy of his journal for his family. He had some expertise in geology, beetle collecting and dissecting marine invertebrates, but in all other areas was a novice and ably collected specimens for expert appraisal. Despite suffering badly from seasickness, he wrote copious notes while on board the ship. When they reached Brazil, he was enthused by the tropical forest, but detested the sight of slavery.

At Bahia Blanca, Argentina, and in cliffs near Punta Alta, he made a major find of fossil bones of huge extinct mammals beside modern seashells, indicating recent extinction with no signs of change in climate or catastrophe. He identified the little known Megatherium by a tooth and its association with bony armor which had at first seemed to him like a giant version of the armor on local armadillos. In Chile, he experienced an earthquake and observed signs that the land had just been raised, including mussel-beds stranded above high tide. High in the Andes Mountains, he saw seashells and several fossil trees that had grown on a sand beach, and theorized that as the land rose, oceanic islands sank, and coral reefs round them grew to form atolls. On the Gal�pagos Islands, he searched for evidence attaching wildlife to an older "center of creation", and found mockingbirds allied to those in Chile but differing from island to island. He heard that slight variations in the shape of tortoise shells showed which island they came from, but failed to collect them, even after eating tortoises taken on board as food.

In Australia, the marsupial rat-kangaroo and the platypus seemed so unusual that he thought it was almost as though two distinct Creators had been at work. He found the indigenous people (Aborigines) "good-humored & pleasant", and noted their depletion as a result of European settlement. The Beagle investigated how the atolls of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands had formed, and the survey supported Darwin's theories. FitzRoy began writing the official "Narrative of the Beagle' voyages, and after reading Darwin's diary he proposed incorporating it into the account. His "Journal" was eventually rewritten as a separate third volume, on natural history. While at Cape Town, South Africa, he met John Herschel, who had recently written to English geologist Charles Lyell, praising his uniformitarianism as opening bold speculation on "that mystery of mysteries, the replacement of extinct species by others" as "a natural in contradistinction to a miraculous process".

When organizing his notes as the ship sailed home, he wrote that if his growing suspicions about the mockingbirds, the tortoises and the Falkland Islands fox were correct, "such facts undermine the stability of Species", then cautiously added "would" before "undermine". He later wrote that such facts "seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species". When the Beagle finally reached Falmouth, in Cornwall, England on October 2, 1836, he was already a celebrity in scientific circles as in the previous December, Henslow had fostered Darwin's reputation by giving selected naturalists a pamphlet of his geological letters. He visited Henslow at Cambridge, who advised on finding naturalists available to catalogue the collections and agreed to take on the botanical specimens. His father organized investments, enabling his son to be a self-funded gentleman scientist, and he made the rounds of the London institutions, being honored and seeking experts to describe the collections.

In December 1836 he took up residence at Cambridge to organize work on his collections and rewrite his "Journal." He wrote his first paper, showing that the South American landmass was slowly rising, and with Lyell's enthusiastic backing, read it to the Geological Society of London on January 4, 1837. That same day, he presented his mammal and bird specimens to the Zoological Society. The ornithologist John Gould soon announced that the Galapagos birds that Darwin had thought a mixture of blackbirds, "gros-beaks" and finches, were, in fact, twelve separate species of finches. On February 17, 1837 he was elected to the Council of the Geological Society, and Lyell's presidential address presented Owen's findings on Darwin's fossils, stressing geographical continuity of species as supporting his uniformitarian ideas. While rewriting his "Journal," he took on editing and publishing the expert reports on his collections, and with Henslow's help obtained a Treasury grant to sponsor this multi-volume "Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle." He stretched the funding to include his planned books on geology, and agreed unrealistic dates with the publisher.

As a result of the stress from his work, his health suffered from the pressure and in September 1837 he had "an uncomfortable palpitation of the heart," so his doctors urged him to quit working and live in the country for a few weeks and get some much-needed rest before resuming his work. In March 1838 he reluctantly accepted the post of Secretary of the Geological Society. The continued strain of writing and editing his Beagle reports again took its toll on his health and in June 1838 he was laid up for days with stomach and heart problems and headaches, which would plague him for the remainder of his life. The cause of his illness remained unknown, and attempts at treatment had little success. In November 1838 he proposed marriage to his first cousin, Emma Wedgewood at her home, Maer Hall, whom he had met the previous year while recuperating from his first bout of illness. She accepted and they were married there on January 29, 1839 and moved to their new home in London, England, and they would have ten children, two of whom died in infancy.

Five days prior to their wedding, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. In May 1839, FitzRoy's "Narrative" was published which included Darwin's "Journal and Remarks" as its third volume," and it was such a success that later in the year it was published on its own. Early in 1842, he wrote about his ideas of natural selection to Lyell, who noted that his ally "denies seeing a beginning to each crop of species. His book, "The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs" on his theory of atoll formation was published in May 1842 after more than three years of work, and he then wrote his first "pencil sketch" of his theory of natural selection. To escape the pressures of London, the family moved to rural Down House at Downe, Kent, England in September of that year. In 1846 he completed his third geological book. In 1849, in an attempt to improve his chronic ill health, he went to Dr. James Gully's Malvern spa and was surprised to find some benefit from hydrotherapy.

In 1851 his treasured oldest daughter Annie became sick, reawakening his fears that his own condition might be hereditary, and after an extended illness she died. In November 1859 his "On the Origin of Species" went on sale and it proved unexpectedly popular, with the entire stock of 1,250 copies oversubscribed. In the book, he set out "one long argument" of detailed observations, inferences and consideration of anticipated objections. His only allusion to human evolution was the understatement that "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history". The book aroused international interest, with less controversy than had greeted Scottish journalist Robert Chambers' popular "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation." The Church of England's response was mixed, with his old Cambridge tutors, Sedgwick and Henslow, dismissing the ideas, but liberal clergymen interpreted natural selection as an instrument of God's design. His close friends still expressed their various reservations but gave strong support, as did many others, particularly the younger naturalists. Darwinism soon became a movement covering a wide range of evolutionary ideas.

In 1863 Lyell's "Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man" popularized prehistory, though his caution on evolution disappointed Darwin. Weeks later, Huxley's "Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature" showed that anatomically, humans are apes, then "The Naturalist on the River Amazons" by Henry Walter Bates provided empirical evidence of natural selection. Through intense lobbying, on November 3, 1864 Darwin was awarded England's highest scientific honor, the Royal Society's Copley Medal. Despite repeated bouts of illness during the last twenty-two years of his life, his work continued. Having published "On the Origin of Species" as an abstract of his theory, he pressed on with experiments, research, and writing of his "big book". He covered human descent from earlier animals including evolution of society and of mental abilities, as well as explaining decorative beauty in wildlife and diversifying into innovative plant studies. His 1868 "The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication" was the first part of his planned "big book," and included his unsuccessful hypothesis of pangenesis attempting to explain heredity.

It sold briskly at first, despite its size, and was translated into many languages. He wrote most of a second part, on natural selection, but it remained unpublished in his lifetime. In 1871 he published "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex" providing evidence from numerous sources that humans are animals, showing continuity of physical and mental attributes, and presented sexual selection to explain impractical animal features such as the peacock's plumage as well as human evolution of culture, differences between sexes, and physical and cultural racial characteristics, while emphasizing that humans are all one species. His research using images was expanded in his 1872 book "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals," one of the first books to feature printed photographs, which discussed the evolution of human psychology and its continuity with the behavior of animals. Both books proved very popular, and he was pleased by the general assent with which his views had been received.

His evolution-related experiments and investigations led to the books "Insectivorous Plants" (1875), "The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom" (1876), "The Power of Movement in Plants" (1880), and "The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms" (1881). In 1882 he was diagnosed with what was called "angina pectoris" which then meant coronary thrombosis and disease of the heart. He died at his Down House residence at the age of 73. He had expected to be buried in St Mary's Churchyard at Downe, but at the request of his colleagues, after public and parliamentary petitioning, William Spottiswoode (President of the Royal Society) arranged for him to be interred at Westminster Abbey, in London, close to Sir John Herschel and Sir Isaac Newton. During his lifetime, many geographical features were given his name. An expanse of water adjoining the Beagle Channel near the southern tip of South America was named Darwin Sound. Mount Darwin in the Andes Mountains was named in celebration of his 25th birthday.

When the Beagle was surveying Australia in 1839, his friend John Lort Stokes, sighted a natural harbor which the ship's captain Wickham named Port Darwin. A nearby settlement was renamed Darwin in 1911, and it became the capital city of Australia's Northern Territory. More than 120 species and nine genera have been named after him. Additionally, his work has continued to be celebrated by numerous publications and events. The Linnean Society of London has commemorated Darwin's achievements by the award of the Darwin-Wallace Medal since 1908. Darwin Day has become an annual celebration, and in 2009 worldwide events were arranged for the bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. He is commemorated in England, with his portrait printed on the reverse of �10 banknotes printed along with a hummingbird and HMS Beagle, issued by the Bank of England. A life size seated statue of him is located in the main hall of the Natural History Museum in London.

A seated statue of him stands in front of Shrewsbury Library, the building that used to house Shrewsbury School, which he attended as a boy. Darwin College, a postgraduate college at Cambridge University, is named after the Darwin family. (bio by: William Bjornstad) The Demise of Charles Darwin | Creation Moments Home > The Demise of Charles Darwin > The Demise of Charles Darwin in Author: Ian Taylor It was four o'clock on Wednesday afternoon of April 19, 1882, when Charles Darwin took his last breath. His final hours had been accompanied by much chest pain and vomiting as his heart struggled to keep going through several attacks. The weakened heart did not survive the final attack and, with the signal death gasp, Charles Darwin left this mortal life. He had lived for 73 years and the last 40 of those years were spent quietly at his house in the village of Downe, just southeast of London. Darwin's eldest daughter, Henrietta, aware of the importance of the last words of famous men, sat poised with pen in hand to catch every last word of her father.

Darwin's wife, Emma, was in another part of the house at the moment of departure but was soon beside Henrietta and her son Francis. After a few moments alone with their thoughts they quickly composed themselves and decided that they must let the rest of the family and friends know the sad news. Letters were hand written and sent to sons William, George, Leonard, and Horace, then to cousin Francis Galton and the family friend, Thomas Huxley. Most of these people lived in London and received their letters via the penny post by the afternoon of the following day. The horse and train postal service of a century ago was not only much less expensive but a great deal speedier than that of today. The national newspapers also had the news of Darwin's death and within 24 hours had announced that his body would be buried in the family vault at St. Mary's Anglican churchyard in Downe. Darwin's elder brother, Erasmus, had died at 77 and his body had been placed in this same vault the year before. Before going further with this account, some readers may have read or heard somewhere that in his last hours Darwin became a Christian.

Science historian James Moore has spent 20 years investigating this story and provides the fascinating details in his book The Darwin Legend. It turns out that the story originated in the fertile imagination of evangelist Lady Hope. Elizabeth Reid Cotton (1842-1922) was born in Tasmania, emigrated with her family as a young child to India then finally to England where she became an evangelist. She married the elderly admiral Sir James Hope at the age of 35 then he died four years later and she retained the title Lady Hope throughout the remainder of her evangelistic career. She worked with D. L. Moody during his English campaign then remarried T. Anthony Denny at the age of 51. She was widowed again 16 years later and, although quite wealthy, she mismanaged her money, became poverty stricken and in a desperate effort made her way to America and the Moody family. It was at this time that she wrote her account of her visit to Charles Darwin over thirty years earlier. She was a skilled writer having written 30 books and told her story in a way that led the reader to conclude that she had discovered that Charles Darwin had had a conversion experience.

She had actually visited Darwin at his home at his invitation seven months before he died, in September 1881. The occasion was precipitated by the visit of two well-known atheists, one of whom was Dr. Aveling, Karl Marx's son-in-law, the day before. Darwin's wife, Emma although a Unitarian attending St. Mary's Anglican church in the village, was always concerned about her husband's salvation and it seems that in order to appease his wife's concern after the visit of Aveling and his friend, Darwin had invited Lady Hope to call upon him. She had been visiting a Mr. Fegan, another evangelist, who lived in the village. It was likely that Darwin's invitation was purely a matter of domestic expediency. In her article, Lady Hope said that she had brought up the subject of evolution and cleverly worded her report: "... his fingers twitched nervously and he said that as a young man he had had some foolish ideas." She went on to say that Darwin had asked her to arrange a prayer meeting in his garden house and talk about Jesus.

From this and other statements like it, the reader would naturally conclude that Darwin was a genuine Christian but she had been careful not to say so. Following the publication of this article in the Watchman-Examiner (Boston, 1915), Lady Hope immediately became the darling of the Christian talk circuit of the day and her fortunes changed. As a result of this publicity and the endlessly repeated editions of Lady Hope's story, the Darwin family was besieged with Christian inquiry and they did their best to protest that Charles Darwin did not become a Christian nor did he make any death bed confession. Afterall, Henrietta was there with pen in hand to record every last word. To return to events surrounding Darwin's death and burial we are reminded from Scripture that anytime God steps into the affairs of men it is never, "something done in a corner" (Acts 26:26) but is always done openly. The details of Darwin's burial, not in St. Mary's churchyard but in Westminster Abbey, were quite definitely "done in a corner." It is a classic case of England's "old boy network" in action and worth a closer look. Victorian London had an obsession with men's clubs.

The capital city had sufficient number of wealthy men to support hundreds of places of comfortable refuge. Each man had his own motive for being a member; for many, it was a place to meet like-minded men to discuss business or politics, for others, it was simply a place of sanctity from their family and the world. Francis Galton, Darwin's younger cousin, was a member of the exclusive Athenaum Club. He had spent his life quite convinced that every human function could be quantified and developed statistical techniques still used to this day. His mechanistic view had quickly accepted Darwin's evolution and, with survival of the fittest as his credo, he advocated controlled breeding to produce England's future ruling classes. It was Galton who had introduced the word "eugenics," meaning "pure born" or "clean birth," to the English language. Upon receiving the letter announcing his cousin's death, Galton was determined that Darwin be buried with the highest honors, next to Sir Isaac Newton's tomb in Westminster Abbey. He raced over to the Royal Society to find the president, William Spottiswoode.

Mathematician, linguist and co-owner of the publishing company that still bears his name, Spottiswoode was an extremely influential member of the Athenaum Club and the inner-circle, X-Club. In his publishing position as Queen's Printer he was able to virtually control everything issuing from the academic press. One of the primary functions of the X-Club was to ensure that all evidence supportive of Darwin's Theory was published as widely as possible. At the same time, contrary evidence such as that submitted by the creationists of the day, was effectively suppressed. The X-Club was founded in 1864 and consisted of nine members, all of whom were also members of the Athenaum Club located in London's Pall Mall. The X-Club had been in operation for 29 years and dissolved with the death of Spottiswoode; most of the members were, by then, quite elderly and worn out with the battle for Darwinism. Thomas Huxley, Darwin's chief apostle, died only two years later. The Athenaum Club opened in the 1830's and is named after the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athene.

There is a gilded statue of the goddess on top of the portico over the front entrance to the club. One of the most exclusive clubs in Britain, it is intended for Britain's intellectual elite; mitred bishops and theologians hobnob with agnostic authors and scientists over glasses of sherry served by liveried waiters. A man can only become a member by invitation and vote — very similar to the Masonic lodge. When Thomas Huxley received notice of Darwin's death he went immediately to the Athenaum Club where he was a member and sought out others who would want to know the news and who would be sympathetic to the idea of Darwin being buried among the famous in the Abbey. Darwin had openly rejoiced that his older friend, Charles Lyell, had made it to the Abbey in 1875, and it was reasonably supposed by Huxley that Darwin would have no objection to being placed there himself, perhaps next to Charles. He was. However, there was not only the Darwin family to persuade but the Church hierarchy. Huxley had had a running battle with the Church for almost a quarter century but even so did have some friends in high places at the Club among whom was the canon of Westminster, Rev.

Frederick Farrar. When approached, Farrar was quite open to the idea and suggested that Huxley ask the Dean of Westminster, Rev. George Bradley. This was an easy matter, because Bradley had been sponsored for election to the Club in 1873 by Galton, Huxley and Spottiswoode. How could the man refuse? Sir John Lubbock was Charles Darwin's younger friend and rather wealthy neighbor in Downe. When he received his letter he went that Friday to the House of Commons where he was member of Parliament for the Liberal Party. He quickly gathered a petition of 28 names from within the 150 members on the benches that day who were in favor of Darwin being placed in the Abbey. At the same time, Rev. Charles Pritchard was persuaded to write a letter to a conservative national newspaper advocating that Darwin not be buried in some obscure churchyard but in the national shrine where thousands could pay their respects. It was by such back-room efforts that arrangements were completed in a very short time, and the funeral took place exactly one week later at noon on Wednesday, April 26.

There were ten pall bearers, four of whom were combined members of the X-Club and the Athenaum Club; the others were sons of the family and rather strangely, the Duke of Argyle who was an active creationist. The casket was finally lowered into its sandy grave beneath one of the flagstones in the north aisle of the Abbey and next to Sir Isaac Newton. It is known as "scientist's corner" since many famous names in science have made their way to this spot. There is an interesting little sequel to this account which became focused only in recent years when the authorities began to charge admission to the Abbey. While there is J. Boehm's marble plaque on the wall to commemorate Charles Darwin , his actual burial place is beneath the flagstone in the centre of the north aisle. It is precisely at this location that there is an ornamental iron choir screen that divides the aisle; this screen has a gate and a ticket booth stands just inside the gate. Darwin's grave is just at this gate, thus, every one of the thousands of visitors who file past to pay their admission fee must step on Darwin's grave.

In Numbers 19:16 we read: Whoever in the field touches one who is slain by a sword or who has died, or a bone of a man, or a grave, shall be unclean seven days. Reporting on Darwin's funeral, the Guardian, a tabloid of the High Anglican Church, said, "... lest the sacred pavement of the Abbey should cover a secret enemy of the Faith..." Christianity may rejoice in Darwin's burial at Westminster as a visible sign of, "...reconciliation between Faith and Science." In retrospect, this statement is seen to be self-denial of prophetic words, because without doubt the sacred pavement does hide a secret enemy of the Church. That enemy has not only destroyed the faith of thousands from his grave but according to Scripture, renders spiritually unclean even those who pay respects to his grave. Footnotes: Hope, Lady [Elizabeth Reid Denny, née Cotton] "Darwin and Christianity" Watchman-Examiner (Boston), n.s., 3, August 19, 1915, p.1071. Moore, James. 1994. The Darwin Legend. Grand Rapids, MI. Baker Books.

Photo: Lady Hope (Elizabeth Cotton) in 1887. Related Articles

Question: Where is the body of Charles Darwin interred?
Answer: Westminster Abbey