As had been the case at the Linnaean Society meeting in July, so now in September neither Darwin nor Wallace (still toiling in the Malay Archipelago) was present to promote the theory of natural selection. According to the Illustrated London News, more than 1,660 members did attend.103 Owen presided magisterially. The Times gave generous coverage to the event, which began on Thursday, 23 September and closed the following Wednesday, and the weekly Athenaeum printed a long account on 16 October. Darwin was mentioned once or twice by speakers, including a Dr Wright, who spoke in Section D (zoology and botany), the section Darwin had been asked to chair. Wright quoted Darwin and his friend William Tegetmeier on bees’ cells.104
Owen gave his presidential speech in Leeds Town Hall on the first evening. The Times, reporting the event the following day, noted that his speech was ‘a very prolix document, which occupied full three hours in its delivery’. The paper’s summary of what Owen had to say includes a reference to the most interesting and up-to-date elements of his speech, namely Owen’s firm support for statistical and sanitary science. It also quotes the opening of the speech, which places God firmly at the helm of all scientific progress and the BAAS as God’s favoured servant. The aim of the association, Owen said, was ‘the knowledge of the laws of nature’ and the application of those laws so as to ‘advance the wellbeing of society and exalt the condition of mankind’. God, he said, had ‘given to mankind a capacity to discover and comprehend the laws by which His universe is governed’.105 Lest anyone should worry about the proven fact that species can become extinct, Owen assured them that this presented no problem for religion since ‘creation ever compensate[es] for extinction’.
The Rev. Dr William Hook, vicar of Leeds, took encouragement from this to claim in his speech of thanks that science, instead of being the opponent of religion, is really ‘the handmaid of Christianity’. The Times reported his words:
People were beginning to see that the philosopher might carry out his researches into the secrets of nature fearless of consequences and regardless of results; and that, at the same time, the theologian, with equal tenacity and boldness, could assert the facts of revelation, since the author of nature and the author of revelation was the same blessed Being. They might also rest assured that the facts of science were reconcilable with the facts of Scripture.106
Though it is to be expected that a clergyman would make such claims, the fact that Owen also spoke so frequently and freely about God in the context of science is a reminder of how far apart he, Britain’s leading light in the scientific establishment, was from Darwin, whose work was conceived and expressed in a fundamentally different form. Little wonder that Darwin had no appetite to join in with such discussions, or that he was so apprehensive about the storm his own work would cause not only among the general public but also among leading scientists. Owen had read the Darwin–Wallace papers in the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society. He devoted two paragraphs of his mammoth speech to them, neither praising nor criticising, but simply summarising. Of Wallace’s essay he says merely that it shows how ‘deviations from type may either tend to the destruction of a variety, or to adapt a variety to some changes in surrounding conditions, under which it is better calculated to exist, than the type-form from which it deviated’. He quotes a paragraph from Darwin on variation in dogs and foxes, prefacing the extract with a faintly praising remark: ‘Mr Charles Darwin had previously to Mr Wallace illustrated this principle by ingenious suppositions, of which I select the following.’107 If he saw that something new and important was afoot, that, as Huxley predicted, the Darwin–Wallace hypothesis would cause a revolution in science, he certainly did not let on.
While his fellow scientists exchanged their views in Leeds, Darwin laboured on ‘most steadily’ at his ‘abstract’, as he still called his work – though by 6 October, as he told Hooker, it was growing to book length. ‘You cannot imagine what a service you have done me in making me make this abstract’, he wrote, ‘for though I thought I had got it all clear, it has clarified my brains much, by making me weigh relative importance of the several elements.’108 On the same day Wallace wrote from Ternate in the Moluccas to both his mother and Hooker, telling the first how gratified he was by the approval Darwin, Lyell, and Hooker had shown for his work and how he expected to acquire ‘the assistance of these eminent men’ on his return to London in a few years’ time. He meant their much-needed support in the business of trying to make a living in science by having his observations published and being given grants for further research. The letter to Hooker was his reply to the news sent in early July about the reading of his and Darwin’s papers at the Linnaean Society; he expressed his gratitude to Hooker and Lyell for making the arrangements and voluntarily declared that Darwin’s pieces had ‘secured to him a claim to priority’.109
In their correspondence all three – Darwin, Hooker, and Wallace – as well as Huxley were exercised at this time about the future of the nation’s natural history collections, which were stuck in the limited confines of the British Museum building, despite being added to all the time. Owen devoted the last part of his Leeds speech to the subject. It was his hope that a completely new museum could be built to accommodate the collections. Scientists were being asked to sign appeals and memoranda to the government, and specifically to Disraeli as chancellor of the Exchequer.
In his speech Owen pleaded with the government, particularly with Disraeli, though not by name. Having mentioned the great ‘practical results’ which had come from scientific successes such as the steam engine, the lightning conductor, the electric telegraph, and anaesthetics in surgery, he spoke grandly and with prospective flattery of a putative ‘far-seeing Finance Minister’, by whom ‘the man of Science will be regarded with a favourable eye, not less for the unlooked-for streams that have already flowed, but for those that may in future arise, out of the applications of the abstract truths to the discovery of which he devotes himself’.110 Owen’s plan was to have a dedicated building, superintended by him. His wish was to be fulfilled finally with the Alfred Waterhouse-designed Natural History Museum, which opened in South Kensington in 1881, and which remains Owen’s greatest claim to fame, outlasting and outdoing his achievements in science. Though Darwin signed the memorandum making the case for a new building, which was addressed to the government by Britain’s leading scientists in November 1858, he took a dim view of Disraeli as its recipient. ‘I cannot put much faith in a memorial[,] even if signed by every real man of science, having much influence at least with such a poor creature as B. Disraeli’, he wrote to Huxley on 1 December.111
By April 1859 the first part of Origin of Species was finished and Darwin had sent it to John Murray. In July he was at Dr Lane’s establishment at Moor Park once more, trying to get up some strength. He wondered how many copies Murray intended to print.112 The first print run was 1,250, but since all the copies sold out on the first day of publication in November, a second run of 3,000 was printed off in December.113 He had told Murray only a few weeks earlier, on 10 September, that on advice from friends he had finally decided to drop the word ‘abstract’ or ‘essay’ from his title. The most important word in what was still a ‘rather too long’ title was ‘Species’.114 Darwin was sure of Hooker’s and Huxley’s admiration and support, though Hooker himself confessed that it took him fourteen years after first reading Darwin’s 1844 fragment to accept his views completely.115 Lyell, though a good friend and mentor, never became a complete convert to the theory of natural selection. He wrote kindly but not enthusiastically after reading his presentation copy of Origin:
I have just finished your volume, and right glad I am that I did my best with Hooker to persuade you to publish it without waiting for a time which probably could never have arrived, though you lived to the age of a hundred …
It is a splendid case of close reading and long sustained argument throughout so many pages, the condensation immense, too great perhaps for the uninitiated, but an effective and important
preliminary statement.116
Lyell’s chief worry was the problem Darwin’s theory posed for humanity, since if one were to accept the hypothesis in the case of other animals and of plants, one would have to accept it in ‘the case of Man’, and ‘all the consequences must follow’.117 As late as 1863 Darwin told Hooker of his disappointment that Lyell had not yet ‘spoken out on Species’.118
As for Owen, Darwin knew he would attack the book. He told Wallace in a letter of 9 August 1859 that ‘Owen, I do not doubt, will bitterly oppose us; but I regard this very little, as he is a poor reasoner’.119 It was tactful and generous to say ‘us’ here in connection with the theory of natural selection, though in the same letter he once more stakes his claim to independent thinking. He reiterates his disagreement with Wallace, expressed in a letter of December 1857, over ‘colonisation of oceanic islands’; while Wallace believed that islands got their flora and fauna from previously existing land connections, Darwin thought that the dispersal of seeds and eggs by wind, water, or birds caused the colonisation of islands.120
He wrote again to Wallace a few days before the official publication date of 24 November, saying that Murray was sending Wallace his copy.121 ‘God knows what the public will think.’ Lyell ‘does not seem’ to be a convert, though Hooker is, and Darwin hopes Huxley will approve; if he does, ‘I shall be content.’ Darwin’s timidity and apprehension about the likely reception of the work were partly a result of his isolation; as he confessed to Wallace, ‘I have not seen one naturalist for 6 or 9 months owing to the state of my health.’122 He had to wait until May 1860 to receive Wallace’s supportive reply.
Meanwhile responses came in letters to him and in reviews. The clergyman, novelist, and amateur scientist Charles Kingsley was one of the first to thank Darwin for his presentation copy. He wrote on 18 November, honestly expressing his respectful disagreement. The book ‘awes me’, he wrote, ‘both with the heap of facts, & the prestige of your name, & also with the clear intuition, that if you be right, I must give up much that I have believed & written’. He agrees with Darwin about the variation and extinction of species: ‘I have long since, from watching the crossing of domesticated animals & plants, learnt to disbelieve the dogma of the permanence of species.’ He even thinks he can reconcile Darwin’s views with his religious faith:
I have gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of Deity, to believe that he created primal forms capable of self development into all forms needful pro tempore & pro loco [for the time and place], as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas w[hic]h he himself had made. I question whether the former be not the loftier thought.123
Darwin was not offended by this response, but rather heartened. He asked Kingsley if he could quote from the letter in the historical sketch of writings on evolution which he was preparing in December 1859 for the second printing.124
On 5 December Marian Evans, or Marian Lewes, as she liked to be known, told a correspondent that she and Lewes had been reading Origin. Her response was a little grudging, largely because she felt that Lewes, a writer of popularising books on science, was not appreciated by other writers on the subject, though he and Darwin corresponded amicably about each other’s work. She saw that Darwin’s book ‘makes an epoch, as the expression of his thorough adhesion, after long years of study, to the Doctrine of Development’, but she thought it lacked sufficient ‘illustrative facts’. Nonetheless, it would ‘have a great effect in the scientific world, causing a thorough and open discussion of a question about which people have hitherto felt timid’.125 Another intelligent lay person, Friedrich Engels, commented enthusiastically to Karl Marx, though he noted disparagingly that Darwin, not being a German thinker, was no theorist:
Darwin, by the way, whom I’m reading just now, is absolutely splendid. There was one aspect of teleology that had yet to be demolished, and that has now been done. Never before has so grandiose an attempt been made to demonstrate historical evolution in Nature, and certainly never to such good effect. One does, of course, have to put up with the crude English method.126
Marx agreed, echoing in his many references to Darwin Engels’s criticism of what appeared to them the ‘unphilosophical’ nature of Darwin’s argument, but grasping the connections to be made between Darwin’s interpretation of natural history and his own of social history. He told a German friend in 1861 that Darwin’s work was ‘most important’; it ‘suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle’, though ‘one does, of course, have to put up with the clumsy English style of argument’.127 The chief philosophical difference between Marx and Darwin was that Marx was a determinist who interpreted history in terms of inevitable progress. In 1866 he welcomed a now-forgotten French book on the origin and transformations of the human and other species, preferring it to Darwin’s work on the grounds that ‘progress, which Darwin regards as purely accidental, is essential here on the basis of the earth’s development’.128
Darwin’s English friends and supporters soon started responding to Origin. Hooker called the book ‘glorious’ in an optimistic letter of 21 November. ‘What a mass of close reasoning on curious facts & fresh phenomena – it is capitally written & will be very successful.’129 Darwin’s brother Erasmus thought it ‘the most interesting book I have ever read’; he wrote discerningly and gratifyingly that he could ‘only compare it to the first knowledge of chemistry, getting into a new world or rather behind the scenes’.130 Huxley, on whose positive judgment Darwin depended and who Darwin knew would review Origin in at least one newspaper or periodical, wrote on 23 November to say that the work had made a great impression on him, and that he was ‘prepared to go to the Stake if requisite’ in support of it, though he disagreed with one or two points, including Darwin’s view that evolution has always been gradual, that Nature has never made ‘jumps’. But Darwin has ‘earned the lasting gratitude of all thoughtful men’, while ‘considerable abuse & misrepresentation’ is ‘in store for you’. Darwin should not worry, for he, Huxley, who later called himself ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, would go into battle: ‘As to the curs which will bark & yelp – you must recollect that some of your friends at any rate are endowed with an amount of combativeness which (though you have often & justly rebuked it) may stand you in good stead. I am sharpening up my claws & beak in readiness.’131
Huxley was surprised and delighted to be asked to write a review in The Times. He told Hooker gleefully that he had sent Darwin a cartoon of himself as a prize-fighter with Hooker ‘holding the bottle’. As for the review, ‘I wrote it faster than I ever wrote anything in my life. The last column nearly as fast as my wife could read the sheets. But I was thoroughly in the humour and full of the subject … I earnestly hope it may have made some of the educated mob, who derive their ideas from the Times, reflect. And whatever they do, they shall respect Darwin.’132
Darwin was thrilled with this review, which was published on 26 December. He had a ‘strong suspicion’, he told Hooker, that it was by Huxley, ‘but I never heard that he wrote in [The] Times. It will do grand service, especially as so nobly soaring above religious prejudices.’133 To Huxley himself he wrote on the same day in unusually high spirits, teasingly wondering who the author of this review might be and praising him for his perspicacity and expertise:
[He] is a literary man & German scholar. He has read my Book very attentively; but what is very remarkable, it seems that he is a profound naturalist … [H]e writes & thinks with quite uncommon force & clearness; & what is even still rarer his writing is seasoned with most pleasant wit … Who can it be? Certainly I should have said that there was only one man in England who could have written this essay & that you were the man. But I suppose I am wrong, & that there is some hidden genius of great calibre. For how could you influence Jupiter Olympus [‘Jupiter’ was a common nickname for The Times] & make him give 3½ columns to pure science? The old Fogies will think the world will come t
o an end.134
Huxley’s review reveals that his strategy for getting Darwin’s views accepted, or at least not rejected out of hand, is to begin with the general statement that new speculations in science are coming faster than ever before, and that each needs careful testing and criticising. He explains that the hypothesis offered by Darwin, ‘the eminent Naturalist before us’, is ‘as vast as it is novel’. It ‘may or may not be sustainable hereafter; it may give way to something else’, but in any case it must be tested properly. Huxley faces head-on the ‘controversy which is coming’ as a result of Darwin’s book, but insists that only the test of science is appropriate. He discusses briefly the idea of the variation of species, and singles out, as Darwin deftly does in the early chapters of Origin, the familiar human activity of breeding animals such as pigeons or dogs in order to capitalise on the most useful features of each species. If man can breed variations in or out of domestic species, why might not nature do the same in the wild, over a long period of time? He notes that others have written about evolution and tried to explain it, from Lamarck to ‘such dreamers as the author of Vestiges’ (a remark about Robert Chambers’s book, which Huxley had reviewed with what he later regretted as ‘needless savagery’135). Darwin’s history is then related – how he belongs to a distinguished scientific family, how he went on his circumnavigatory voyage and published some of the results of his research, and how he has been working on the current book for over twenty years. ‘No living naturalist and anatomist has published a better monograph than that which has resulted from his labours.’136
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