Charles Darwin

by A. N. Wilson

  In fact, when the book arrived, Huxley was in South Wales investigating marine invertebrates on the beach at Tenby – the charmingly pretty Pembrokeshire resort where George Eliot first began to write fiction. Darwin told Huxley, ‘If ever so practised a hand as you sets to work on the Cirripedia I have no doubt whatever you will discover many errors on my part.’1 While tentatively endorsing Darwin’s view on the connection between the cement glands and the ovaria of the Cirripedia, however, Huxley was unconvinced by Darwin’s assertion that the gut-formed glands were the ovaria. (Cement glands excrete a proteinaceous adhesive, or cement, which enables barnacles to stick to rocks, boats, etc.) He was, nevertheless, impressed by Darwin’s skill as an anatomist. Since Huxley’s return from Australia, Darwin had liked the man and had written references for him. ‘You are excellently qualified for a Professorship in Natural History.’2 It does not appear, though, that the two men were sufficiently close for Darwin to win him over, during the 1850s, to a belief in evolution, still less in the theory of natural selection. Huxley had been irritated by the slapdash methods, the ‘unscientific habit of mind’ of Vestiges; ‘it set me against Evolution’.3 He was not converted until he read The Origin of Species.

  If Huxley was the new friend, and if the old friends and patrons of Darwin’s genius – Lyell, Hooker, Henslow – remained unconvinced or only partially convinced by his views, there was one naturalist in the world with whom Darwin could trust that he had intellectual kinship – that is, the curator of the Museum of the Royal Asiatic Society in Bengal, Edward Blyth. When Hooker had gone to India in 1848, Darwin had recommended him to look up Blyth in Calcutta.

  Blyth had been far from idle. In 1849, he had published a Catalogue of the Birds in the Museum Asiatic Society in Calcutta, with, the following year, a Supplement. Until this book was written, containing 1,816 species of bird with addenda, very little work had been done on the taxonomy of Indian birds, and as Blyth put it, ‘the nomenclature of Indian birds’ was ‘so recently in a state of chaos’.4

  This book would have been a prodigious achievement in itself, finished as it was against bouts of illness in author and in his wife, and in the absence of other ornithologists with whom to discuss his work, time for observation in the field and adequate reference books. It was not all he did, however, as the fifth volume of the Cambridge University Press Correspondence of Charles Darwin makes plain.

  Blyth was a compulsive cataloguer, a joyful naturalist who was interested in absolutely every species. Darwin could not have hoped for a more encyclopaedically voracious observer, or a more willing sharer of his observations. Fire a question from Down, about otters in South India, about rabbits and whether they were indigenous to the subcontinent, about mules or about Malayan cats or pigeons, and one could be certain of a detailed enthusiastic response in thousands of words. The letters of Blyth to Darwin during the 1850s amount to notes, not only for The Origin of Species but also for The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication and The Descent of Man. Blyth’s letters were heavily annotated in pencil by Darwin:

  Cormorant

  Otters do they breed those that are

  trained Canary birds bred

  Prolifickness of Rabbits

  of Races

  What a memory you have

  Will acknowledge everything . . .

  Conclusions to which Darwin moved with reluctant slow paces, such as the kinship between man and the apes, were cheerfully assumed by Blyth:

  I think we have run mankind home to the tropical regions of the old world, probably (so I think) to both Asia & Africa (the regions of the Orang & Chimpanzee respectively, which are the two most nearly affined genera); and it seems to me that specifical distinctions are more likely to be [truly] detected among the quasi-primitive races referred to, than among the infinitely commingled & variously modified races which are more or less civilised (i.e. domesticated); while among these latter, the next grand point of interest is to trace the stages & phases of development, upon emerging from the primitive forest life. – How is it that most of the Papuans, with the Bushmen & Earthmen of S. Africa & others, are so very diminutive? I am far from being satisfied that insufficiency of nutritional food is the cause of this.5

  Whereas Samuel Thomas Sömmerring and the anatomists of the liberal Enlightenment in the eighteenth century had established the kinship of African slaves with European humanity and had inspired old Josiah to his question, ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’, mid-nineteenth-century colonial Europeans wanted to create an hierarchical taxonomy, with civilized, ‘domesticated’ human beings at the top, wearing silk hats and stiff collars, stays and crinolines, whereas the subject ‘races’ of humanity, squat, naked and brown, were plainly closer to our common ancestors the orang-outangs. That Blyth threw out this observation casually, not as the central platform of some crackpot racialist manifesto, is what makes it so revealing of its time. Besides, with his omnivorous collector-mentality, Blyth was no longer primarily interested in the ideas about the origin of species which he had so fructiferously suggested in articles written nearly twenty years in the past. He would probably have agreed with Hooker, who wrote to Darwin in July 1855, ‘The more I study, the more vague my conception of a species grows, & I have given up caring whether they are all pups of one generic type or not . . .’6 Blyth was more than happy, by this stage, for Darwin to puzzle out the implications of all the abundant data which he was able – ‘What a memory you have!’ – to supply. In September 1855 he re-read the second volume of Lyell’s Geology, finding that he in fact remembered most of it, though it had been eighteen years since he had last turned its pages. What had altered was the extent of his own knowledge, so he wrote out – in all humility acknowledging the author’s greatness – a list of Lyell’s mistakes. He did not want his name to be associated with the emendations, and in expressing this modest thought, he set down what was evidently his credo: ‘truth is what we seek, & the establishment of it is the more important in proportion to the high scientific rank of the authority we presume to call in question’.7

  The central tenet of Darwin’s theory of the origin of species, the tenet which he was so patiently attempting to establish, was not merely that species evolve, or mutate, but how they do so. And the clue lay in those early essays of Blyth’s – that, through the process of natural selection, species were adapted to their environmental needs: a finch that needed to obtain nourishment from tree-bark developed more woodpeckerish tendencies than one which could eat insects from leaves. A mammal that ate foliage from trees needed the ever-longer neck of the giraffe. This was the principle. Twenty-first-century scientists can test the process by which certain characteristics are strengthened or perfected by computer-generated, speeded-up evolution. Was it possible for Darwin, in the 1850s, to learn anything from artificial breeders of racehorses, dogs or pigeons?

  Blyth freely, and to us perhaps ominously, used the word ‘race’ as a synonym of species, tending to use the noun ‘breed’ for hybrids. ‘It occurs to me to add, that no “varieties” have ever sprung up in America analogous to the humped Ox, the fat-rumped Sheep, or new races of fowls or Pigeons!!! I distinguish races from breeds artificially produced by the intermixture of the latter; which latter, like hybrids generally, have little tendency to become permanent.’8

  Blyth’s breezy, chatty sentences enunciated some facts which challenged Darwin’s idée fixe: it seemed not so much that he had forgotten his analogy between artificial hybrids and the processes of nature as that he no longer considered it. What interested Blyth was an accumulation of fact. And here was a fact which, if invariable, would knock the theory of natural selection off balance, if not destroy it altogether. If hybrid adaptations, artificially produced, were impermanent in their results, this surely provided a poor model for natural selection which was slowly handing on to the future single-hoofed as opposed to three-toed horses, sharp-beaked tree-finches and so on. An adaptation which did not last beyond a generation would be fatal. ‘Mr
Blyth makes a great distinction between “Breeds” artificially made & “Races”. why I know not.’9 The problem created by Mr Blyth’s ‘great distinction’ was very much more than an irritating detail, for it cut to the very heart of the theory. If adaptations within species could not be explained by the analogy of artificial hybrid-breeding, how much less could actual transmutation in which one species evolved into a new one? This, after all, is what makes the Darwinian theory of evolution distinctive – the process of natural selection.

  There was – is – literally no limit to the search which would be required to demonstrate the hypothesis, even in a plausible majority of species. Single-handed as he was, Darwin looked out for evidence wherever he could find it. Blyth’s fascination with everything matched his own. Hooker provided patient, thorough and detailed answers to Darwin’s botanical inquiries, seed by seed, plant by plant. ‘I most earnestly hope’, Darwin could write, ‘that at Vienna you will make particular enquiries about the pure Laburnum, which one year bore the hybrid flowers & on one sprig the C. purpurens – Dr Reissik (?) is name of man I think. [George] Bentham [Honorary Secretary of the Botanical Society, later President of the Linnean Society] will not believe that it was a pure Laburnum, & it does seem quite incredible . . .’10

  Lyell, for his part, had geological doubts about the theory which he passed on sometimes in letters to Hooker, sometimes directly. Lyell wondered, if all species are in the state of flux which Darwin suggested, how natural history could be possible: it appeared to destroy the taxonomy of Linnaeus and throw everything back into a melting-pot. ‘I fear much that if Darwin argues that species are phantoms, he will also have to admit that single centres of dispersion are phantoms also . . .’11 Much of Lyell’s geology was posited on the notion that groups of species spread out from a single geographical source while remaining constant in form. Fossils of identical species demonstrated that they were of the same age. Hooker, for his botanical part, as well as supplying Darwin with factual evidence, raised repeated questions. ‘You say most truly about multiple creations & my notions,’ Darwin wrote on 13 July 1856, ‘if any case could be proved, I shd be smashed: but as I am writing my Book, I try to take as much pains as possible to give the strongest cases opposed to me, & offer such conjectures as occur to me . . .’12 One of these objections, as Darwin candidly acknowledged the month following, was that ‘the vegetable world does not appear in the confusion I should expect it to be in, were transmutation the law’.13 This was to say nothing of another aspect of the theory, which would come markedly to the fore in its printed version, about nature being in a state of struggle: as he gazed at the tranquil water lilies in Kew Gardens, Hooker could be forgiven for not imagining them to be at war.

  In this they differed from academic scientists.

  Darwin dreaded fisticuffs, while contemplating the publication of a theory which could not fail to excite heated controversy. Towards the end of 1856, at a meeting of the Geological Society in November, Richard Owen read a paper on a much-debated fossil mammal named by him Stereognathus ooliticus. His case was that a single fossil tooth could legitimately lead to the determination of affinities and organization of an entire skeleton.

  Huxley had written a paper taking a very different view, even though he had not acknowledged to himself how close he was to accepting a ‘mutational’ position with regard to species. Hearing Owen commit ‘a cutting telling & flaying alive assault’ was a bitter experience.14 Huxley felt himself treated as an ‘implacable foe’ by Owen.15 The battle lines were being drawn for the war that would divide the scientific academy when The Origin of Species was eventually published. ‘The best natures insensibly deteriorate under such trials,’ Darwin remarked sadly.16

  Darwin meanwhile gave particular attention to his experiments with artificial hybrids. ‘I have been astonished at differences in skeletons of domestic rabbits,’ he told Hooker.17 His young nephew Godfrey Wedgwood, who would one day take over the management of the Etruria Works,18 quizzed the gamekeepers at Sandon Park,19 the seat of Lord Harrowby near Stone, Staffordshire, on the domesticated rabbits which had ‘gone native’ and, having escaped their hutches, mated with rabbits in the wild, noticeable for their different colouring. (This would be of more use in The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication than it would be for The Origin of Species.)

  A more obvious species to observe, partly because they were to hand, partly because artificial breeding played so large a part in the culture of their ‘fanciers’, were doves and pigeons. Darwin grew up in a house with a dovecote, and not long after settling at Down he began to keep some ornamental pigeons, as well as some specialist chickens which would also be of potential use to him. His twentieth-century biographer Janet Browne most attractively suggested that ‘he could not help but anthropomorphize natural selection into a mating ceremony deftly engineered by a wise, all-seeing and sensible English gentleman’.20 At one point in his enthusiasm he had as many as ninety pigeons at Down, of sixteen different kinds and eight or nine different types of fowl. By studying what the breeders and fanciers were trying to effect, ‘Darwin could almost watch the process of artificial selection taking place.’21

  Almost as soon as he began to acquaint himself with pigeon-fanciers, Darwin realized that they believed that each breed was a distinct one, deriving from a variety of wild stocks, whereas Darwin (in common with nearly all academic taxonomists) believed they all derived from a common ancestor, the rock pigeon. Here, then, was a possible template for nature itself, the whole of it: the apparently different species possessing in fact a common ancestry. Lyell could still not get his mind around it. Hooker, with the friendliest will in the world, had his doubts. The theory, however, with the stupendous attraction of its immense simplicity, could at least be tried. The wider Darwin cast his net and the more random his inquiries the better, so that whether he was contemplating orang-outangs or barnacles, rabbits or lilies, he was asking of them the same basic cluster of questions.

  Pigeons, moreover, provided the chance of human diversion. Darwin was for much of his life a recluse, and it is hard to know whether it helps us to place this fact in a hedge of causative sentences. Was he ill because his intellectual concentration was so potentially revolutionary, so explosive? Was he reclusive because his work demanded so much concentration? Reclusive he may have been but exclusive, compared with Emma, he was not. Emma had two friends before she was married, at Maer. Beyond that, she never had any friendships outside the admittedly large circle of the Wedgwood and Darwin families. Her aunts, her sisters, her sisters-in-law, her nephews and nieces, these were her only intimates. Darwin had, at least, the intellectual companionship of his scientific colleagues, and in these years, up to and beyond the publication of his great work on The Origin of Species, this companionship was increasingly necessary, from both a cerebral and an emotional point of view. He could also take pleasure, as he developed his interest in pigeons, in the very different social life.

  To William, his son, a boy at Rugby, he could write delightedly of his acquaintanceship with Bernard Brent, ‘a very queer little fish’ who was a well-known pigeon-fancier. Darwin paid John Lewis, the Down carpenter, to muck out his own collection of pigeons,22 and there were occasional mishaps. Etty always resented the fact that her beloved cat had been killed at her parents’ behest, and without her knowledge, for mauling one of the pigeons.23 ‘I am getting on splendidly with my pigeons: and the other day’, Darwin proudly told William, ‘had a present of Trumpeters, Nuns & Turbits; & when last in London, I visited a jolly old Brewer, who keeps 300 or 400 most beautiful pigeons & he gave me a pair of pale brown, quite small German Pouters. I am building a new house for my tumblers, so as to fly them in the summer.’24 The brewer was Matthew Wicking, of the brewers Jenner, Wicking and Jenner in Southwark Bridge Road.

  A most valued new friend was William Bernhard Tegetmeier, a journalist and naturalist, who would admit Darwin into the Philoperisteron Society, a club of gentlemen pigeon-fanciers t
hat met in the Freemasons’ Tavern in London. Darwin attended these meetings when health permitted. Tegetmeier, as well as supplying Darwin with company rather different from his family, was also the procurer of birds and animals. He sent laughing pigeons in a cage to Down by carrier on 4 June 1856, having previously dispatched an Angora rabbit – all grist to an evolutionist’s mill – and Darwin remained what he had always been, a boy-naturalist, never happier than with animals. Only Emma’s last confinement, giving birth to their son Charles Waring Darwin, prevented Darwin attending the Freemasons’ Tavern to hear Tegetmeier read a paper on the development of the skull of Polish fowls.25

  Charles Darwin Junior was born on 6 December 1856. In the year which saw the birth of this, the last of their children, they had also experienced – a mere month earlier – the death of their aunt Sarah. Born in 1778, she was the last surviving child of Josiah Wedgwood I, and had come to live at Petley, Down, to be near her niece and nephew. Her childish eyes had looked on Dr Erasmus Darwin as he sped up to Etruria in his phaeton, heard her father extol the glories of the French Revolution, and been taken to hear Mr Priestley, the great chemist, preach at the Unitarian Meeting House in Newcastle under Lyme. The father who had leant over her cradle had been born into poverty on the damp village hillside of Burslem. Enriched by his ingenuity, the family who followed her coffin were gentlefolk. There was a sense of it being a farewell, not just to one old lady, but to a whole generation: a great assembly of Wedgwoods – Jos, Frank, Hensleigh – joined the Darwins, donned black cloaks and affixed black crape to their silk hats.26 Darwin considered that Mr Innes, the perpetual curate, ‘did not read this very impressive service well’.27