by Janet Browne
Darwin probably initiated some practical measurements of worm activity in the ground as well, although the archival record is unclear. At some point, a flat, heavy stone, originally a surveyor’s bench-stone, was placed on the lawn in the Down House garden, serving as a device for indicating the rate at which worms made it sink. This particular experiment was predominantly Horace’s, and involved Horace in constructing a metal recording instrument to measure the descent of the stone, even though the idea was plainly drawn from Darwin’s work. It remains uncertain how much of the plan Darwin laid out beforehand. Horace wrote an article about the sinking of the stone in 1900. Another stone was similarly placed in his sister Caroline’s garden at Leith Hill.73
A gently melancholic air suffused this work. Darwin’s life had slowed down to the pace of his subjects. He mused on the vast reaches of time, of days when Roman villas or prehistoric stones stood upright on the earth’s surface, of things long gone, and eternity. He knew he was aging, and that the close of his life could not be very far away. Sometimes when Lettington turned over the compost heap for him and he saw countless wormholes in the dark earth, he momentarily glimpsed his grave. The thought did not worry him unduly. Echoing a remark of his grandfather’s that he had included in his book on Erasmus Darwin, he said he had “no fear of death, after such a life,” and he considered himself fulfilled. He contemplated the deaths of Emma’s sister Elizabeth Wedgwood and her brother Josiah Wedgwood in 1880 without any obvious distress. Many friends remarked on the serenity of the last years of his life. Darwin became at the end what he had always been in his heart, almost part of nature himself, a man with time to lean on a spade and think, a gardener.
He found time to give financial support to needy causes. He was upset to hear that the Brazilian home of his friend Fritz Müller had been flooded, and that Müller’s apparatus and books might have been destroyed. “I have long looked on him as the best observer in the world,” he cried to Ernst Krause, and offered Müller money to replace his scientific losses. His ability to empathise with personal scientific disasters like these was always remarked by others. He said he could imagine his own distress should something similar happen to him.
His thoughts also rested on Anton Dohrn, the director of the Naples Zoological Research Station. Zoologists from Germany and Britain travelled every summer to the Stazione to rent laboratory space and investigate the invertebrate fauna of the Bay of Naples. Darwin was interested in the Stazione’s progress, even though he must have sighed at Dohrn’s incessant requests. Would Darwin donate money for the library or sit on the supervisory board? Could he supply favourable remarks for the report of the Stazione’s activities or send a photograph of himself so that a local sculptor could create a plaster bust for the grand saloon? Here Darwin was witnessing Dohrn’s single-handed construction of a research school—an intellectual and practical scientific tradition—that was to dominate zoology in coming decades. He seemed not to mind the way that Dohrn exploited him. In fact, Dohrn’s determined transformation of Darwin into an iconic father figure was one of the simplest and most potent devices to ensure the coherence of a clearly defined interest group. The Stazione came to represent one of the first and most influential centres of embryological research, almost the only laboratory in the world at that time to research Darwinism in action.74 Perhaps Darwin found it comforting after the Butler debacle. It was a curious form of Darwinism nonetheless. Dohrn proposed that ancestral vertebrates emerged not from ascidians as Darwin and others popularly supposed but from annelid worms whose digestive and nervous systems must have reversed places in development. “May I venture to caution you not to extend too far the degradation principle,” suggested Darwin with disquiet.75 All his experience of earthworms indicated that they were simple because they were primitive, not because they had degenerated from a more complex form.
Despite the differences, when Darwin was awarded a large sum of money as the Buffon Prize of the Linnean Society of Turin, he asked Dohrn if he might welcome some piece of equipment for the Stazione up to the value of £100 (Dohrn asked that the gift be used to start a travel bursary scheme). In similar vein, Darwin supported the Cambridge University Zoological Museum. He also sent money to help the author Grant Allen over a bad time, and contributed to William Boyd Dawkins’s plan to explore limestone caverns in Yorkshire, via the Settle Cave Exploration Fund. Sometimes he let himself be gulled. When a German palaeontologist called Leopold Wurtenberger requested a loan, Darwin replied that he did not lend money and enclosed a cheque as a present.
He had time, too, to consider good works. In 1881, he approached Hooker with an idea that had been gestating for several years. He wanted to pay for the Kew botanists to publish a revised version of Ernst Gottlieb Steudel’s Nomenclator, an index to the names given to plants. One edition had been published in 1840, and since then the list had been kept up at Kew by handwritten additions. This wish was heightened by his abiding respect for Hooker and the work done under his jurisdiction at Kew. In fact, he wanted to follow Lyell’s example and bequeath sums to all his favourite sciences. Lyell had left money in his will to advance geological research, and Darwin had told Lyell before his death that he would do the same if only “he had fewer sons.” Anthony Rich’s bequest probably helped to loosen his purse. In any event, Darwin notified Benjamin Daydon Jackson, of the Linnean Society, that “it was his intention to devote a considerable sum of money annually … in aid or furtherance of some work or works of practical utility to biological science.”
On the occasion of my last visit to him [wrote John Judd, the geologist] … he dwelt in the most touching manner on the fact that he owed so much happiness and fame to the natural-history sciences which had been the solace of what might have been a painful existence;—and he begged me, if I knew of any research which could be aided by a grant of a few hundreds of pounds, to let him know, as it would be a delight to him to feel he was helping in promoting the progress of science. He informed me at the same time he was making the same suggestion to Sir Joseph Hooker and Professor Huxley with respect to Botany and Zoology respectively. I was much impressed by the earnestness, and indeed, deep emotion, with which he spoke of his indebtedness to Science, and his desire to promote its interests.76
Darwin’s desire to expand Steudel’s Nomenclator did not materialise in the form he anticipated. Backed by his money, the project turned into the Index Kewensis, a huge enterprise edited by Benjamin Daydon Jackson and the Kew herbarium staff, listing all known plant names with the written sources in which those names were first given. When it was finished, it included 375,000 entries.77 It was not published until 1892–95. Darwin’s sponsorship was recorded on the title page, and the proper title was Nomenclator Botanicus Darwinius.
The vigilant generosity extended to obscure workers as well. From 1878, Darwin supported James Torbitt, a wine merchant and grocer in Belfast, who was engaged in breeding experiments to produce an infection-proof race of potato. Ever since the Irish famine of 1845, Darwin had followed the continuing uncertainty over the causative agent of potato blight, remembering his own failed attempt with Henslow to grow uninfected stock from the Beagle specimens he had collected on the island of Chiloé. Darwin busied himself in Torbitt’s project, writing to Farrer and other friends in high places to commend the investigation. In 1881 he sent the equivalent of a research grant to Torbitt. “I have the pleasure to enclose a cheque for £100,” he told him. “If you receive a government grant I ought to be repaid.”
Most of all he was disturbed to hear that Wallace was in desperate financial straits. Wallace was unsure where to turn next, with no permanent job and rapidly looming poverty. Alarmed by the news, Darwin mobilised all his influential contacts. He hoped to get a government pension awarded to Wallace despite the continuing confusion whether scientists were eligible to receive them.78
Of course, Darwin regretted what he deemed Wallace’s lack of caution in scientific affairs. These regrets were freely shared by many of their
scientific contemporaries. When Hooker had come back from the British Association meeting in Glasgow in 1876, he had snorted crossly to Darwin, “Wallace as Presiding Spiritualist made a black ending to a scientific meeting.” And Wallace was always in some sort of financial trouble, usually of his own making. Whatever investment he made, the company’s shares were bound to drop in value. Architects and builders cheated him. He rashly accepted a challenge to prove the roundness of the earth (and won), but went to court when the wager remained unpaid and libellous accounts began circulating against him. Wallace learned too late that justice does not come cheap. In 1880 he sold his house at Grays, Essex, and purchased a cottage in Godalming, hoping to live on the slender earnings from his publications. But for all that the two evolutionists disagreed over natural selection, spiritualism, mankind, sexual selection, animal colours, and plant distribution, Darwin wished “most heartily” for Wallace’s comfort and happiness.
As with Butler and Farrer, not everything went according to plan. Hooker did not wish to support a scheme for Wallace’s pension and needed to be persuaded otherwise. He believed Wallace had “lost caste” and would embarrass the scientific cause, although he was mollified by Wallace’s pathbreaking study of evolutionary biogeography, Island Life, published with a handsome dedication to Hooker in 1880. This book became the foundation of high-level research into animal and plant distribution. Darwin moved in turn to Lubbock, to Huxley, and then to his old sparring partner on the evolution of mankind the Duke of Argyll. They all thought the request would have more power if made by Darwin alone. Nonetheless, a memorial describing Wallace’s “lifelong scientific labour” drafted by Arabella Buckley and Darwin, adjusted by Huxley, and signed by Darwin and other eminent figures, including Argyll, arrived on Gladstone’s desk in January 1881.79
“I hardly ever wished so much for anything in my life as for its success,” Darwin told Arabella Buckley. He put a good deal of effort into writing letters for this ambitious political project, one that proved more demanding than many of his natural history researches. “It has been an awful grind—I mean so many letters.” In the end, influenced on the one hand by the Duke of Argyll’s approval and on the other by Darwin’s personal stature and the public nature of his and Wallace’s scientific achievement, Gladstone awarded Wallace a pension of £200 a year—a modest sum but manna from heaven for Wallace, “a very joyful surprise … very great relief from anxiety for the rest of my life.”80 To Darwin he wrote, “There is no one living to whose kindness in such a matter I could feel myself indebted with so much pleasure and satisfaction.”81
Darwin called it a “splendid” outcome. Whatever mixture of feelings was motivating him, he recognised that it was both his pleasure and a duty to save Wallace. Their interlocking lives required it. Now, their dual story could be safely closed—he had done his best for his companion in the pages of history. Truly, as Wallace implied, no one but Darwin could have succeeded in initiating and gaining agreement for the award. The link between them was as asymmetric yet as honorable and as extraordinary as ever.
Two months later, Gladstone came back with a request of his own: would Darwin serve as a trustee of the British Museum? He refused. “I am much obliged for the honour which you have proposed to me, & this I should have gladly accepted, had my strength been sufficient for anything like regular attendance at the meetings of the Trustees. But as this is not the case, I think that it is right on my part to decline the honour.” This exchange was probably the source of a later tale that Gladstone offered Darwin a knighthood that was turned down. It seems that Darwin was never offered any such honour.
Otherwise, as Darwin pottered about in his garden, he easily forgot how famous he was. Occasionally people might glimpse a tall thin figure in a dark hat and cloak in one of the surrounding lanes. “An elderly man was walking slowly down,” said Wallis Nash, a temporary neighbour.
Seeing me he turned aside and stood as I moved along the road, with his back to me, studying the face of the chalk quarry in the hill, from which the road material of chalk and flints had been dug. The action was that of a shy and nervous man, and I looked curiously at him as I passed. I saw, in side view, a slender and somewhat bowed man, with a “drawn face,” heavy white eyebrows and beard, under a soft black hat. He wore black clothes and a cape, with a grey plaid shawl wrapped round his shoulders. There was something familiar in the general outline, and I wondered if I had met that man. Suddenly recognition came to me. It was the pictures of the author of the “Origin of Species” I had in mind, the original of which I had passed, looking at the chalk quarry on the road to Down.82
Or visitors would be welcomed into a booklined study by a courteous old man. Edward Aveling, who brought Ludwig Buchner to Down House in September 1881, said their host was very retiring. More unlikely house-guests than these could scarcely be imagined. The two radical social philosophers were attending the Congress of the International Federation of Freethinkers in London. Buchner was widely reputed to be the fiercest materialist in Europe; Aveling was a proclaimed atheist. Only a few months before, Darwin had written to decline Aveling’s request to dedicate The Student’s Darwin to him, saying that the atheistic portions took his views “to a greater length than seems to me safe.”83
The lunch party could hardly have been more incongruous either. For moral support the Darwins had also invited John Brodie Innes, their old vicar. Yet the occasion was congenial. After eating, the men retreated to Darwin’s study, and there, “amidst the smoke of cigarettes, with his books looking down upon us, his plants for experiments hard by, we fell to talking.”84 Aveling urgently asked Darwin if he was an atheist. He preferred the word “agnostic,” he replied. “Agnostic was but Atheist writ respectable,” responded Aveling, “and Atheist was only Agnostic writ aggressive.” The guests pressed Darwin to consider his role in spreading free thought—every freethinker should proclaim the truth “abroad from the housetops!” Towards the end, they cordially settled on the insufficiency of Christianity. “I never gave up Christianity until I was forty years of age,” claimed Darwin. “It is not supported by evidence.” Impressed by Darwin’s obvious sincerity, Aveling published an excitable description of this interview in 1883, after Darwin’s death, calling it The Religious Views of Charles Darwin. His article upset the remaining members of the family.
Other visitors to Darwin’s study were struck by the evident signs of his mind at work. Wallis Nash recalled that “the walls were covered to the ceiling with well-worn books, which overflowed into the passages and landings on the upper floor.” Plant pots stood on the table and window-ledges, a fire burned in the grate, a woollen shawl hung on the high-backed leather chair. During the last few years of Darwin’s life, several men and women came to venerate this room almost as if it were his mind itself—a theatre of memory and intelligence that could be revered either with or without his presence. The photograph that Leonard took of the old study just before Darwin vacated it for the new conveyed something of the same sense of an abstract mind at work. In the photograph Darwin was not even in the room.
As he continued to retreat into domestic privacy, Darwin found it all the more perplexing when he was recognised by strangers. A passing incident in February 1881 was a revelation to him. That month Darwin went to London to hear John Burdon Sanderson speak on insectivorous plants at the Royal Institution. Sanderson and he had a friendly word or two beforehand in a back room, and as Darwin entered the auditorium from the front, a burst of applause rippled around the audience. Darwin looked behind him to see who had come in. He took several minutes to realise that it was he who was being applauded.85
Nevertheless, he felt himself sinking. “What I shall do with my few remaining years of life I can hardly tell,” he wrote to Wallace while visiting Ullswater. “I have everything to make me happy and contented, but life has become very wearisome to me.”86
In August 1881, he was invited to be a public figure again, this time to make a guest appearance at the Inter
national Medical Congress to be held in London. There was more than just celebrity involved here, although that was probably the primary reason that he was asked. Darwin had recently endorsed vivisection again, in a letter to the Times in which he put the case for “the incalculable benefits which will hereafter be derived from physiology,” a major strike for science. This evoked a spate of rejoinders from Frances Power Cobbe, Richard Hutton, Lord Shaftesbury, and George Jesse, as well as a flurry of pamphlets, reprints, and even a leader in the Times itself.87 Suddenly Darwin looked like a highly appropriate figure to parade before the medical luminaries due to attend the congress.
This congress was by far the biggest medical convention ever held, drawing more than three thousand participants, including Lord Lister, Rudolf Virchow, Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and Jean-Martin Charcot. Darwin could not but be involved. Sir James Paget and Sir William Gull asked him to the opening reception to meet the Prince of Wales and the “chieftains of science.” Paget invited him to lunch and Gull asked him to dine, both of them evidently with a view to complimenting their guests with a glimpse of England’s own star turn. Erasmus remarked that his brother was “clearly becoming a fashionable as well as scientific swell.” Indeed, at the reception he seems to have upstaged most of the other dignitaries by shaking hands like royalty with scores of foreign visitors, many of whom he already knew through correspondence, finding a word or two to say to everyone. Huxley was amused by the fuss. He too asked to be introduced to Darwin, bowing horizontally over his friend’s hand with a flourish. The chaff between them could not disguise Darwin’s international renown. For the meal he was seated at the top table.
There was an immense crowd of all the greatest scientific swells and much delay and I was half dead before luncheon began. I sat down opposite the Prince and between Virchow and Donders who both spoke bad English incessantly and this completed the killing.88
