Beyond the much-discussed coincidence of their shared birthday on February 12, 1809, what common factors linked Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin?

The simultaneous bicentennial celebrations of America's 16th President and Britain's most celebrated naturalist featured endless attempts to connect the two great men.

The most common formulation portrayed them both as liberators, with Lincoln breaking the chains of slavery and Darwin purportedly freeing all humanity from the bondage of ignorance and superstition. Superficial resemblances (yes, the twin titans both wore beards) also helped to fuel the recent trans-Atlantic efforts to compare the careers of two of the most influential individuals of the nineteenth century. For instance, both Darwin and Lincoln achieved international fame relatively late in life: the pioneering scientist at age 50 with publication of "On the Origin of Species" in 1859 and the often-frustrated prairie politician with his election as president the following year. The two men also shared a passionate loathing of slavery, along with enduring a lifelong series of mysterious maladies, with periods of incapacitation and apparent depression derived from undiagnosed illness (that may have been psychosomatic). Darwin, who outlived the assassinated Lincoln by almost exactly seventeen years, spent the last years of his life cruelly tormented by his punishing intestinal problems and painfully inflamed skin.

For all the strained efforts to join these two fascinating figures as destiny's darlings, the leading commentators have largely ignored their most significant common trait – a crucial factor in both lives that becomes unmistakably obvious after a visit to their homes.

Both structures now function as museums consecrated to the memory of their one-time occupants. The Lincoln Home in Springfield, Illinois (administered since 1972 by the National Park Service) sheltered Abe and Mary Lincoln and their four boys for seventeen years preceding his departure for the White House. The Darwins (Charles, Emma and their ten children, seven of whom survived childhood) spent more than forty years in Down House in the Kent countryside not far from London. Their newly restored and re-opened home welcomes visitors under the auspices of English Heritage.

Down House, with its extensive, shaded grounds and well-kept gardens, provided a far more gracious and spacious dwelling than did Lincoln's downtown home in bustling, freshly settled state capital, but then Darwin grew up as the son of a prosperous and prominent physician, while Lincoln really did begin life in abject poverty in a log cabin with a dirt floor. Nevertheless, by the time he purchased the respectable house at Eighth and Jackson Streets, Lincoln had become a noted lawyer and veteran state legislator whose additions to the building made it one of the finest homes in the neighborhood. The 1860 Census showed the house inhabited by "Abraham Lincoln, a 51-year-old lawyer," his 42-year-old wife, their three surviving sons, as well as a "22-year old hired girl" (one M. Johnson) and a 14-year-old "hired boy," Phillip Dinkell.

The interiors of the two homes display striking similarities, especially since the painstaking restoration to their original Victorian splendor with over-stuffed furniture, patterned wallpaper, heavy curtains, busy, decorative and richly-hued carpets, thick wooden desks and chests, innumerable ornate candlesticks, sentimental sculptures, framed prints and portraits, and well-stocked libraries with handsomely bound volumes of cherished books. Both homes qualify as handsome and comfortable, even by the standards of our own age, let alone the more modest terms of the mid-nineteenth century. Though Lincoln and Darwin never came close to meeting, each of them might have adapted without too much difficulty to his counterpart's abode, though Charles would have surely commandeered the Lincoln "guest room" to accommodate his ongoing specimens and experiments. Despite the scientific paraphernalia in Down House, the two houses each come across as undeniably homey, cozy, unpretentious, snug. The untranslatable German word "gemutlich" comes to mind--- agreeable, comfortable, pleasant, down to earth. Continued...