But Darwin would hardly have achieved what he did if he had been compelled to secure for himself a professional position in order to obtain bread and butter. Such great problems demand not only the whole of a man's mental energy, they monopolize his time. Studies of detail may well be taken up in leisure hours, but big problems absorb all the thoughts and must always be present to the mind, lest the connexion between the many individual inquiries, which make up the whole task, be lost sight of. Darwin had the good fortune to be a free investigator, and to be able to retire, on his return from his travels, to a small property at Down in Kent, there to live for his family and his work. Here he followed up the idea of evolution which he had already formulated, and it has always seemed to me the most remarkable thing about him, that he was able to keep in mind and work up the hundreds of isolated inquiries that were eventually to be brought together to form the main fabric of his theory. When one studies his many later writings, one cannot but be surprised afresh by the number of different sets of facts he collected at the same time, partly from others, partly from personal observation, and continually also from his own experiments. He made experiments on plants and on animals, and the number of people with whom he carried on a scientific correspondence is simply astounding. In this way he brought together, in the course of twenty years, an extraordinarily rich material of facts, from the fullness of which he was able later to write his book on _The Origin of Species_. Never before had a theory of evolution been so thoroughly prepared for, and it is undoubtedly to this that it owed a great part of its success; not to this alone, however, but still more, if not mainly, to the fact that it presented a principle of interpretation that had never before been thought of, but whose importance was apparent as soon as attention was called to it--the principle of selection. Charles Darwin championed, in the main, the same fundamental ideas as had been promulgated by his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, by Treviranus, and by Lamarck: species only seem to us immutable; in reality they can vary, and become transformed into other species, and the living world of our day has arisen through such transformations, through a sublime process of evolution which began with the lowest forms of life, but by degrees, in the course of unthinkably long ages, progressed to organisms more and more complex in structure, more and more effective in function. It is interesting to note at what point Darwin first put in his lever to attempt the solution of the problem of evolution. He started from quite a different point from the investigators of the early part of the century, for he began with forms of life which had previously been markedly neglected by science, the varieties of our domesticated animals and cultivated plants.