One of the more unusual invitations Darwin received was to be a patron of the Crystal Palace cat show, the first nationwide cat show in Britain.

Some of the stranger things Darwin received in the post can tell us a lot about how Darwin worked at home. In 1863, Darwin was very excited when the ornithologist Alfred Newton sent him a diseased, red-legged partridge foot with an enormous ball of clay attached. He wanted to further test his statement in Origin of species about birds being ‘highly effective agents in the transportation of seeds’ (Origin, p.

Darwin was almost always in the company of dogs. Nina, Spark, Pincher, and Shiela. Snow, Dash, Bob, and Bran. The beloved terrier Polly (right). They were Darwin's constant companions at home and in the field, on walks and in sport, in his study and by the fireside. They were also fascinating objects of study. Darwin observed their variations in breed and behaviour, their adaptation to specific conditions, and their mental and emotional abilities, which approached those of humans.

Was Darwin an invalid? In many photographs he looks wearied by age, wrapped in a great coat to protect him from cold. In a letter to his cousin William Fox, he wrote: "Long and continued ill health has much changed me, & I very often think with pain how cold & indifferent I must appear to my few old friends … but I … know that the inner part of my mind remains the same with my old affections."

Darwin is famous for showing that humans are just another animal, but, in his later years in particular, his real passion was something even more ambitious: to show that there are no hard-and-fast boundaries between animals and plants.