Darwin's Ghosts

by Rebecca Stott

Robert Grant, who was also new to the list, was Darwin’s old mentor at Edinburgh. Now impoverished and mocked for his views, he was teaching at the University of London. Reading Darwin’s Origin had prompted Grant to finally publish his evolution lectures and to remind Darwin that he had published articles on evolution in Scottish journals all through the 1820s. Darwin disliked Grant’s radical political views and wanted to distance himself from them, but he knew he would have to include him in the list if he was to stick to the rules of gentlemanly behavior.

  There were demotions, too. In 1860, Darwin took one name off the list: Benoît de Maillet, the eccentric Frenchman who had worked up a theory of animal-human kinship in Cairo in the early eighteenth century. In his savage review of Origin, Richard Owen had implied that Darwin was as foolish as the deluded Maillet, who had believed in mermaids. That was more ridicule than Darwin could bear. He took a pen and put a line through Maillet’s name.

  By the fourth edition of Origin, completed in ten weeks in 1866, Darwin’s list had swelled to no fewer than thirty-seven names. Since the publication of the third edition, he had found another eight European evolutionists in an article published back in 1858 by his German translator, Heinrich Georg Bronn, which he had not been able to read until Camilla Ludvig, the Darwin family’s German governess, translated it for him. Darwin no longer had the time or the patience to test each of the claims individually, so he placed all eight new names inside a single footnote.

  And then in 1865, just as Darwin was completing the final amendments to the fourth edition of Origin, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle stepped out of the shadows as a claimant. James Clair Grece, a town clerk and Greek scholar from Redhill, wrote to Darwin claiming that he had found natural selection in Aristotle’s work, ideas recorded in lecture notes scribbled in Athens two thousand years earlier. He had translated the passage into English for Darwin as proof. Darwin had read Aristotle at school. He admired him above all other naturalists, he told Hooker—even more than Linnaeus or Cuvier. But he knew so little of his work, and he was not going to learn Greek at this stage in his life. So in every version of the “Historical Sketch” he had written so far, he had simply “passed over” the “ancients,” apologizing for the limitations of his knowledge.

  The passage Grece sent was from a book that Darwin did not know, and, given that Grece’s translation was pretty incomprehensible and that he was reading the words out of context, it was difficult for him to tell whether it really was an ancient Greek version of natural selection, as Grece claimed. But Darwin was prepared to give the clerk the benefit of the doubt because he admired Aristotle; he was the first man to have looked closely at animals and the structures and connections of their bodies—all animals, right down to the sea urchins and the oysters and the sponges. And he had done all of that close observation and dissection without microscopes or dissecting tools or preserving spirits.

  With no time to ask abroad or test the claim, Darwin placed both Aristotle and Grece together into the same footnote destined to appear in the fourth edition of Origin.

  Aristotle was now the first man on Darwin’s list and the last man to enter it. Darwin was delighted to add Aristotle to his list but wished he could have said more, explained more about how the Greek philosopher might have come to understand species and time more than two thousand years earlier. Instead he had to make do with a footnote.

  The next time Grece wrote to Darwin it was not about Aristotle but about a pig.

  It was November 12, 1866. Darwin’s morning mailbag had doubled if not tripled in size since the publication of Origin. People continued to write to him from all over the world. They offered him facts like gifts, as if he were now the sole chronicler of all nature’s strange and peculiar ways, as if he were the owner of a great factory of facts, grinding them out in the millstones of his brain to make something that might be labeled “nature’s laws.” People sent him facts about the tendrils of climbing plants, the valve structures of barnacles, the mating habits of hummingbirds. He collected them all and filed them away.

  This morning was no different. Darwin reached for the first letter from the top of the pile that his butler had arranged on his desk. The envelope was postmarked Redhill in Surrey. He tried to recall who he knew there, who might have sent the letter. Inside the envelope, he found a letter from Grece and a cutting from the Morning Star dated November 10, 1866. Grece explained that he was sending an oddity of nature for Darwin’s files in case it might be of use in the future. The newspaper headline read “FREAK OF NATURE,” and the article described a pig that had apparently sloughed off its entire black and bristly skin from snout to tail in one mass in a single night, revealing underneath an entirely new mottled pink body. The pig was, the journalist recorded, apparently unperturbed by its night adventure and was eating as hungrily as before, oblivious to the scores of visitors who had flocked to see it. The owner had pinned the discarded skin to the door of the pig’s sty with a notice that read “Do not touch.” No natural philosopher, the letter writer complained, had yet been to see the pig. He encouraged Darwin to do so. He might be able to make sense of the unusual occurrence.

  “You may recollect me as having some year or two since pointed out to you a passage from Aristotle,” Grece wrote, “shewing that ‘Natural Selection’ was known to the ancients.” Grece was claiming his due, Darwin realized, as if having been placed in a footnote with Aristotle in the fourth edition of Origin were not reward enough. By 1866, Darwin was weighed down with a sense of the debts he owed to the hundreds of naturalists who sent him things. “Should you like to see the animal,” wrote Clair James Grece, town clerk of Redhill council, railway enthusiast, chronicler of the local sloughing practices of pigs, “it is on the premises of one Mr. Jennings, a baker, in Horley Row about one mile north of the Horley Station of the London and Brighton railway. A fly might not be procurable at that station, so that you might prefer to alight at the Redhill Station, where vehicles are readily obtainable, and whence it is about four miles to the southward.”

  By the time Darwin’s “Historical Sketch” appeared in the fourth edition of Origin, it had been ten years in the making. Of the distribution of nationalities of these evolutionists, fourteen were British, nine French, six German, two American, one Italian, one Russian, one Austrian, one Estonian, one Belgian, and, if he were to count Aristotle, one an ancient Greek. A reviewer might easily have thought that Darwin was making a point about British superiority in the biological sciences. Yet only Darwin knew how little design there had been in the composition of the “Historical Sketch.” Only he knew the way in which certain names had been shoehorned in at the last minute and how doubtful he was about the status of some of those claimants, particularly the most recent additions.

  Yet Darwin found the final distribution of nationalities pleasing. There were only nine Frenchmen as against fourteen British. Now he had finally proved once and for all that evolution was not an exclusively French idea, that it was not the spawn of French revolutionaries, part of a conspiracy to bring down the church and government and all social hierarchies. It was just as much the discovery of British clergymen, doctors, fruit farmers, and gentleman naturalists working away with microscopes in houses in the British provinces.

  Darwin looked at the gaps in the list, too. That enormous gap between the first person on his list and the second—the Greek philosopher Aristotle and the eighteenth-century French naturalist Buffon—puzzled him. What had happened in that chasm of more than two thousand years? If Grece was right and Aristotle had begun to formulate vaguely evolutionary questions about the history of animals in 347 BC, even if they were only flickers of a vision he could not yet see clearly from his vantage point, what had happened to those embryonic ideas? Where had they disappeared to? Religious repression was too easy an answer; there were always freethinkers in a population of people, however repressed, however much they lived under the eye of censoring priests. There must have been transmutationists in that gap of two thous
and years, he reflected. Perhaps they had disappeared beyond all historical record.

  Something else about the Aristotle footnote troubled Darwin long after the fourth edition of Origin had found its way into the bookshops. He could not see how anyone in ancient Greece, even the great philosopher, could have foreseen natural selection. There were no microscopes and so no way of studying single-celled organisms. There were no taxonomic theories to work with or against, so there was no way of understanding the various families of animals or the relationship between the plant and animal kingdoms. There were no systematic anatomical or dissection methods and no way of preserving body parts during examination. There were no studies of the effects of plague or population statistics. No libraries. Surely there were only superstition and sacrifice and vengeful gods and the relentless Greek sun turning everything black and fly-infested. How was it possible?

  *The Reverend Baden Powell was the father of Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scouting movement.

  *The botanist Joseph Decaisne.

  *It was Samuel Steman Haldeman (1812–1880), an American taxonomist and polymath.

  2

  Aristotle’s Eyes

  LESBOS, 344 BC

  Dawn. In the port of Mytilene, on Lesbos, a scattering of fishing boats sail back into harbor across the turquoise sea. Once the boats are securely moored, ropes thrown and knots tied, the fishermen lug their morning’s catch in woven baskets to a table built into the side of the harbor wall, spilling out a torrent of glistening-scaled silver, gold, and red fish. Here, every morning, under a cloth canopy erected to protect the catch from the heat of the sun, the fishermen sort their fish into piles, separating out octopus from mullet, sardines from bream, making a separate pile for the small fish for which they have no name. Cats crouch under stools and behind old crates; men arrive in carts pulled by donkeys; the bartering begins.

  A group of young men wearing finely woven tunics wander unhurriedly through the harbor market among the fishermen and traders. The slaves who accompany them carry rolls of papyrus,* jars, nets, and cutting implements. Philosophers from the school across the sea in Assos, these men live in the harbor town but spend their days in the island forests and meadows talking, poking about under stones or in caves, or studying the trees in the petrified forest, always arguing, peering, recording, asking questions of farmers, fishermen, and animal breeders. On tables and rock surfaces they cut open animals and insects and fish and peer inside: cuttlefish, crickets, chameleons, and butterflies. Nothing is too small for their attention.

  The fishermen know one of the philosophers as Theophrastus, now in his early twenties, who was born in Eresos, a village on the southeast of the island where his father worked as a laundryman. It was Theophrastus who had brought the philosophers here. He knows Mytilene well, though he has been away in Assos for several years studying in the school there. The older man in the group, clean-shaven and wearing fine clothes and expensive rings, is the great teacher Aristotle. People say he is wise beyond all men, but he is also a Macedonian and even in remote Lesbos the locals keep the Macedonians at a distance. Macedonia is a country to be reckoned with. Philip, the king of Macedonia, has imperial ambitions. He has his eye on the Greek city-states, and beyond them, Persia. And the rumors about Aristotle always connect him with Philip. Some people say the philosopher is Philip’s creature; others that he advises the great king; still others that he is a spy. In Lesbos, though, the fishermen say, he seems to be interested only in fish.

  The fishermen of Mytilene harbor collect fish for Aristotle. They throw the fish that he has asked them to find for him into large clay bowls filled with seawater that stand in the shade under the fish market table. He wants them alive, not dead, and he pays well for unusual or particularly well preserved specimens or for fish fat with eggs. Theophrastus explains that Aristotle is collecting the names of all the animals on earth. He wants to describe every single living thing, every fish and bird, so as to discover the secrets of nature’s patterns. He wants to know how the fish of Lesbos swim, feed, defend themselves, what they eat, whether they sleep, smell, or hear.

  The fishermen tell the philosopher everything they know. Aristotle, amused at some of their descriptions, notes how their minutely detailed knowledge of marine life is shot through with myths, magic, and superstition. They tell him that they have seen fish with twenty eyes and octopuses dancing in submarine caves with their arms entwined, and that they live in fear of a whale the size of an island with the head of a man. But they know how to tell one fish from another; they know about spawning and the movement of shoals and mating patterns. Aristotle is interested only in their facts.

  Aristotle did not inherit a tradition of natural philosophy; he had no mentors or teachers. Although huntsmen, farmers, pigeon breeders, beekeepers, and apothecaries had built up a body of knowledge about agriculture, stock breeding, hunting, foods, drugs, poisons, childbirth, and dying over centuries, Aristotle was the first to collect animal specimens, the first to describe and record species, the first to think those things worth doing. He was the first to believe that if he looked long and hard enough inside the bodies of birds, bees, butterflies, and fish, nature would reveal its secrets. He was the first to believe that nature had secrets, and that those secrets would answer complex metaphysical questions in addition to physical ones.

  From the sky, the island of Lesbos looks like a creature with two pairs of arms reaching out into the sea—one pair reaches southeast toward the coast of modern-day Turkey and the other southwest toward the southern coast of Greece. Each of those pairs of arms enfolds a vast lagoon, like two watery eyes—shallow, clear as glass on a windless day, and teeming with fish and seafood. The island landscape is austere and volcanic, studded with olive groves and fragrant shrubs. To the west, up near the small town of Eresos, where Theophrastus was born, the stumps of a petrified forest of ancient sequoias spike up through white gravel. The climate is wet and hot. Natural springs bubble up through cracks in the limestone rock on the eastern side of the island, and the island’s rivers are seasonal: in the summer they disappear; in the winter they run like torrents. Sixty different species of flower are native to the island.

  Lesbos, the crossroads between three continents, is also an island of migrants. Thousands of birds stop here on their migration paths to and from Africa; fish, reptiles, and insects, accidental travelers carried in the holds of trading boats from ports on all sides of the Aegean, have made their homes here. The islanders themselves are the descendants of migrants—Persians, Anatolians, and Greeks.

  Aristotle was a political refugee when he crossed the sea to Lesbos from the hill town of Assos, in Turkey, where he had recently established a school. While the king of Macedonia was expanding his empire south and taking city after city in his path, it was not safe for Aristotle, as a Macedonian, to return to Athens. He arrived in Lesbos with his pupils and disciples and his young wife, who might also have been pregnant with his first child, at the invitation of his student Theophrastus, the young botanist who had been born here and who described to him the beauty and abundance of the island.

  When Aristotle saw the lagoon and the fish, he was enchanted. The philosopher and his students stayed on Lesbos for two years inscribing hundreds of papyrus rolls with descriptions of the wildlife, descriptions that years later he would write up into lectures for his pupils when he returned to Athens. Those lecture notes—expanded and added to—eventually became some of the most influential books about the natural world of all time: Aristotle’s Parts of Animals, The History of Animals, and On the Generation of Animals. They contained the very first systematic and empiricist studies of nature, the very first attempts to decipher nature’s codes. All of Aristotle’s great philosophical works—his ideas on governance, metaphysics, ethics, logic, and rhetoric—were inflected by the great zoological project that he began on Lesbos.

  Aristotle’s life can be mapped only through the fragments of letters, myths, stories, and eyewitness accounts th
at have survived. There are times when he disappears altogether from the historical record. But nonetheless, despite the disappearances, we know enough about the contours of his life to be confident that he was a man of voracious curiosity, that he traveled widely, and that he worked constantly to seek answers to an extraordinarily wide set of questions about subjects that today we would subdivide and label as ethics, art, poetry, cosmology, physics, metaphysics, politics, rhetoric, theater, linguistics, biology, and zoology but which he saw as indivisible from one another.

  It all began with a sea journey.

  From the age of seventeen, Aristotle had lived a charmed life in Athens wandering the colonnades and libraries of Plato’s Academy and the streets, marketplaces, papyrus stalls, and gymnasia of the great city. For twenty years, first as a student and then as a teacher, he had been Plato’s most challenging and most promising protégé. People said he might even succeed Plato at the Academy.

  But as a Macedonian living in Athens, Aristotle was always a metic, an immigrant. While the politics of the Aegean were turbulent—and they always were in the fourth century BC—to the locals, the fact of Aristotle’s not being an Athenian citizen made him a foreigner from the barbarian north, an outsider. Later writers have claimed that Plato described his clever student as a wild horse, a stallion who needed bridling, a young man who was forever kicking back, kicking up. If Plato did say these things about Aristotle, perhaps he was thinking of that Macedonian childhood, that northernness.

  We know that Aristotle felt his foreignness keenly in Athens, for he complained about it to his friend the Macedonian general Antipater years later. “In Athens things that are proper for a citizen are not proper for an alien,” he wrote; “it is dangerous [for an alien] to live in Athens.” He could not own property or vote; he paid a monthly poll tax and might be conscripted at any time. Although there were many metics in the city, Athenians were especially wary of Macedonians because of the king of Macedonia’s imperialist ambitions. Macedonian metics might be spies working for the king or interlopers or assassins, Athenian citizens whispered to one another; they were not to be trusted. And Aristotle was no ordinary Macedonian. His father had been the court physician and friend of King Amyntas III of Macedonia, father of the barbarian King Philip.