And then he did an extraordinary thing: he put his notes away and for the next decade and a half busied himself with other matters. He fathered ten children, devoted nearly eight years to writing an exhaustive opus on barnacles ("I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before," he sighed, understandably, upon the work's conclusion), and fell prey to strange disorders that left him chronically listless, faint, and "flurried," as he put it. The symptoms nearly always included a terrible nausea and generally also incorporated palpitations, migraines, exhaustion, trembling, spots before the eyes, shortness of breath, "swimming of the head," and, not surprisingly, depression.
接着，他做出了一件惊人之举：他将他的笔记扔到一边，用了15年的时间忙于别的事情。他成了10个孩子的父亲，他花了将近8年的时间撰写一部关于藤壶的详尽的著作。（“我比以往任何人都讨厌藤壶。”在这项工作结束以后，他叹息着说。这是可以理解的。）他得了一种怪病，经常无精打采，头晕眼花，“心神不定”，他自己说。他时常感到恶心，心率失调，偏头痛，极度疲劳，浑身打战，眼冒金星，呼吸短促，“头脑变得轻飘飘的”，情绪极度低落，这是不足为怪的。

The cause of the illness has never been established, but the most romantic and perhaps likely of the many suggested possibilities is that he suffered from Chagas's disease, a lingering tropical malady that he could have acquired from the bite of a Benchuga bug in South America. A more prosaic explanation is that his condition was psychosomatic. In either case, the misery was not. Often he could work for no more than twenty minutes at a stretch, sometimes not that.
他得病的原因，至今没有定论。人们有许多猜测，但最无根据而又最有可能的是他患了一种热带慢性病夏格氏病，他有可能是在南美洲被寄生虫锥体虫叮咬而感染这种疾病的。一种比较符合实际的说法是一种身心疾病。无论是哪种病，痛苦是不言而喻的。他常常只能连续工作不超过二十分钟，有时甚至更短。
Much of the rest of his time was devoted to a series of increasingly desperate treatments — icy plunge baths, dousings in vinegar, draping himself with "electric chains" that subjected him to small jolts of current. He became something of a hermit, seldom leaving his home in Kent, Down House. One of his first acts upon moving to the house was to erect a mirror outside his study window so that he could identify, and if necessary avoid, callers.
在他余生的许多时间里，达尔文尝试了一系列越来越绝望的治疗方法——洗冷水浴呀、泡醋呀、电疗呀，最后一种害得他不停地遭受小小的电击。他几乎成了一个隐士，很少离开他在肯特的家。搬家以后的第一个举措是在书房的窗外立了一面镜子，这样他可以提前发现，必要的话还可以回避来访之客。