Charles Darwin*

by Kathleen Krull

  At nine, he was sent away to the private boys’ boarding school in the center of town, where Ras had been going for the past three years. Shrewsbury Grammar School was a little over a mile away, fifteen minutes from The Mount, but it was another world.

  The school trained rich boys to enter a university like Cambridge or Oxford. The older boys carried loaded guns and sometimes threatened each other, the food was terrible, beatings were frequent, the blankets on Charles’s bed were always damp, and for years afterward he could summon up the memory of the stench of some thirty chamber pots underneath the boys’ beds.

  At Shrewsbury, only the classics were taught—Greek and Latin, ancient history and geography. There were no science classes. The beliefs of the Church of England lay behind everything that was taught in school, so everyone would have taken for granted the Bible’s description of the origin of the world. It was created in six days and populated with all the animals looking then the same way they still did in current times. The creation of Adam and Eve was the pinnacle of God’s work.

  Charles was not a good student. Once the headmaster even yelled at him and humiliated him in front of the whole school for wasting his time. But for almost seven years, he was stuck at Shrewsbury School. “Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind.”

  He desperately wanted to be outside, lifting up stones to discover insects, inspecting the surface of a pond, exploring with Ras. He actually ran away from school whenever he could—dashing home after attendance was taken, racing back for nighttime lockdown. If he’d been caught he would have been expelled. That would have made his father very angry.

  When Ras took up chemistry, Charles did too. A revolution was taking place in chemistry. One of the pioneers was Joseph Priestley, who, about thirty years earlier, had been one of the discoverers of oxygen, and had published a history of electricity. The Darwin brothers knew all about Priestley—their own uncle Josiah Wedgwood had helped to fund Priestley’s research, partly for business reasons, since Wedgwood was looking for advances in glazes and clays.

  The brothers took over a toolshed in the back garden. This was their official “laboratory” for performing simple experiments as outlined in their copy of William Henry’s Elements of Experimental Chemistry. They analyzed minerals, coins, crystals in various stones and minerals, tea leaves, and the effects of the sun’s rays on various things, using household items like sewing needles to create simple tools.

  Equipment was a problem. They started off with a thermometer, fireproof china (courtesy of Uncle Josiah), and a lamp that supplied the flame for heating gases and chemicals. They had vast plans for more, but their penny-pinching father kept them on a tight leash. Arguing with Dr. Darwin was generally pointless. Whenever the brothers did get money from him, they called it “milking the Cow,” and spent hours debating what to buy, drooling in shops that sold test tubes, minerals, blow pipes.

  Their favorite occupation was to set off explosions. But they were also ambitious, trying to duplicate the experiments of Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry, the author of The Sceptical Chymist. They hoped to isolate a new element, like Humphry Davy, who several years earlier had discovered sodium and potassium and helped identify the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine.

  They did succeed in manufacturing nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, first discovered by Priestley. Taking laughing gas was a craze at the time. Charles’s nickname became “Gas.” He also did experiments on the gaslights at school, until the headmaster found out and gave him a lecture, complete with a pull on his ears.

  Dr. Darwin had decreed that both of his sons were to follow him into medicine. It was a blow when Ras departed for Cambridge University, leaving Charles behind. For three long, lonely years, Charles struggled on at Shrewsbury School on his own.

  Every weekend he rushed home to work in the lab. The two brothers exchanged long letters, Ras offering advice about the lab from a distance. “If the Cow is not utterly consumed at the next milking,” he suggested, “it would be a very good thing to buy as many of the large green, stoppered bottles as possible.”

  By 1825, Ras was about to graduate from Cambridge. Now he would continue his medical studies with a year of practical work. Dr. Darwin couldn’t help notice that his younger son was not doing at all well at Shrewsbury. He decided to pull sixteen-year-old Charles out of school ahead of time and send the pair of them to Edinburgh University in Scotland.

  The Darwin brothers—together again—were off to become doctors.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sickened by Blood

  ODDLY ENOUGH, NO degree was required for practicing medicine in Darwin’s day. In fact, Charles, like Ras before him, spent his sixteenth summer as a sort of junior doctor, helping his father treat the poor of Shrewsbury. He had up to a dozen patients of his own, mostly women and children not sick enough for the hospital. He’d note symptoms for his father to identify, then would make up the prescriptions himself. Some potions were iffy at best—a baby with a cough might be given a mixture of opium, sherry, and brown sugar—and harmful at worst.

  Dr. Darwin was convinced that Charles had the makings of a brilliant doctor. He thought his son had a talent for “exciting confidence” in patients, which he believed was the key to medical success. His son was much less sure about his future in medicine, but one seldom questioned Dr. Darwin.

  Now Charles was at Edinburgh University, a hub of science, to study medicine and follow in the wake of his brother, father, and grandfather. It was exciting to be in big, bustling Edinburgh. The first year he hung out exclusively with Ras, attending some of the same lectures, eating meals with him. Ras set a record for borrowing more library books than any other student, and Charles was close behind. He also bought a copy of A Naturalist’s Companion by George Graves, to use along the Scottish seaside. The brothers went for regular Sunday nature walks to fishing villages on the Firth of Forth, examining tide pools, looking for interesting shells and stones, buying oysters covered with tiny creatures to dissect.

  But as for medical school—not much to like. At Edinburgh, the professors’ income depended on how many students signed up for their courses, which meant that classes were like popularity contests. Teachers competed and feuded with each other in unscholarly ways. Classes were noisy free-for-alls, with students stamping their feet to show agreement, hooting their disapproval, using trumpets and peashooters when particularly irked.

  Darwin was highly critical of most of his professors. One was “so very learned that his wisdom has left no room for his sense.” Of another he wrote, “I dislike him and his Lectures so much that I cannot speak with decency about them.” The classes themselves—anatomy, surgery, midwifery, chemistry, materia medica (today’s pharmacology), and natural history—he either found “intolerably dull” or dismissed as “useless.”

  Visits to the operating theater traumatized him. Patients screamed in agony as amputations and other procedures were performed without anesthetic. The most upsetting was when the patient was a child—witnessing such operations “haunted” him for years. For the rest of his life, the sight of blood made him severely sick to his stomach.

  He unenthusiastically passed his courses, but it was a lot more satisfying to be outside in the fresh air, collecting, riding. Also, he took up shooting with a vengeance, so eager that he kept his special hunting boots by his bedside, ready to go at a moment’s notice. In an odd (for someone who loved nature) but utterly fashionable way, he was an avid hunter—rabbits, rats, pigeons, partridges, pheasants—killing as many as three animals a day.

  He did spend time at Edinburgh University’s natural history museum, one of the best in Europe. He made friends with John Edmonstone, a freed black slave who mounted specimens there. Edmonstone was someone Darwin greatly admired, and from him he took private lessons in taxidermy, the art of preserving and stuffing dead animals.

  He also liked his chemistry teacher, the popular Thomas Charles Hope. The brothers had outgr
own the lab, which had turned back into a toolshed. But chemistry still intrigued them, and they both fell for Hope’s showmanship. Hope attracted classes as large as five hundred for his highly visual lectures, conducting experiments with equipment so expensive he did not allow students to touch it. So the class was all talk, no hands-on experimentation.

  After a year of medical school, the most important thing seventeen-year-old Darwin had learned was this: he did not want to be a doctor. He was interested in everything in nature except the human body. To avoid an argument, he kept this news from his father. Another reason for his silence was money: he now had a clearer understanding about just how rich his father was. Darwin realized he would probably never have to work for a living, much less practice medicine, if he didn’t want to. So there was no reason to make waves.

  Thus he dutifully returned to Edinburgh for his second year, without Ras, who was off to attend a school of anatomy in London.

  This year Charles avoided corpses and blood as much as possible. He missed Ras, but he started hanging out with other students, got new calling cards, and became very fashionable. Darwin even started to take snuff (smokeless tobacco sniffed through the nose). He joined the Plinian Natural History Society, named for Pliny the Elder, an ancient Roman with vast interests, who had written a famous natural history of Rome. It was a science club—favoring botany, geology, zoology—that met in an underground room to read and discuss papers. The club had been founded by Robert Jameson, a noted professor of geology, a few years earlier.

  Jameson had translated the works of French biologist Georges Cuvier, who came up with the important new theory of Catastrophism: at one point, long ago, Cuvier believed, the earth had undergone a series of violent geologic changes. These catastrophic events explained why the earth had different layers of rocks and why certain species had died out.

  In his introduction to the translation of Cuvier’s work, Jameson wrote that the biblical flood could be counted among these world-changing catastrophes. This statement made the Church very happy. As for Darwin, he found Jameson stiflingly boring (he called him “that old brown dry stick”), but he did learn something about geology from him.

  Robert Grant, a thirty-three-year-old lecturer in zoology, took Darwin under his wing. For some four months he worked with Grant in marine zoology. Grant taught him how, with the help of a microscope, to dissect marine life—simple creatures like sea worms, sea slugs, mollusks. The unusually open-minded naturalist began taking Darwin as his guest to lectures and meetings not open to undergraduates. Grant shared his latest ideas with Darwin, thrilled to be conversing with the grandson of the famous Erasmus Darwin.

  One day Grant dropped his guard and praised Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s views. Lamarck was a French biologist, a professor of zoology, who had proposed an early theory of evolution, which he called transmutation. He suggested that life had started with a few simple species that changed and developed over time into the vast array of complex animals and plants of the modern world. Lamarck believed that nature was on the move, not static. However, he mistakenly believed species could will these changes to happen and pass them along to future generations.

  Someone, either Grant or Jameson, had published an anonymous paper in 1826 praising “Mr. Lamarck” for explaining how the higher animals had “evolved” from the “simplest worms.” It was the first use of the word “evolved” in the sense we use it today. Darwin was probably the first person with whom Grant shared his thoughts on evolution. Not until he was an established professor would Grant come forth publicly.

  Darwin had already encountered these ideas in his grandfather Erasmus’s Zoönomia. Erasmus proposed that one of the scientific laws that governed the natural world was transmutation by acquired characteristics. “Would it be too bold to imagine, that . . . perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, all warm-blooded animals have . . . arisen from one living filament?” he wrote. Life possesses “the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!” Erasmus believed the “first great cause” created that “living filament.” By “first great cause” he meant God.

  Thanks to his work with Grant, Darwin made his first Plinian presentation with his own discovery: the black particles found in oyster shells were the eggs of a skate leech, not seaweed spores, as previously thought. Then he went on to discuss something else he’d discovered under his microscope: what he first thought were eggs were actually larvae. Why? Because they were moving by themselves, something eggs can’t do. Darwin had seen under his microscope that what he had thought were the spores of a type of seaweed called Flustra seemed to be able to move by themselves. This had never been observed before. He had rushed to tell Grant—this was Darwin’s first taste of the thrill of scientific discovery.

  But Grant’s reaction was not at all what Darwin had expected. Grant was miffed; he felt Darwin was treading on his territory. He warned Darwin not to publish his findings. Darwin was heartsick and embarrassed.

  Never enthusiastic about his future career in medicine, Darwin—with help from the sisterhood—tried to convince his father to let him quit. Dr. Darwin was furious. “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching,” he yelled, “and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”

  He remembered this humiliating scolding, word for word, until his death. It was probably the low point in Charles Darwin’s life.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Beetle in His Mouth

  HE EVER-PRACTICAL Dr. Darwin came up with a Plan B. If Charles couldn’t be a doctor, then he could be a clergyman in the Church of England, a country Anglican parson.

  As usual, Charles didn’t argue. He agreed with his father that it was wrong to be merely “an idle sporting man.” He had to have some profession, and this was a respectable one that would allow enough free time to continue studying nature. Most naturalists at the time were clergymen in the tradition of Gilbert White, who viewed exploring the “wonders of God’s creation” as part of a minister’s duties. Charles had some concerns about the requirement to declare a belief in all the dogmas of the Church of England, but he still believed in the truth of everything in the Bible.

  So at age eighteen, Darwin went off to Cambridge University to study theology. Former classmates of Ras’s helped Charles get settled. He was jazzed to live in rooms that the theologian William Paley had once lived in. Darwin admired Paley’s Natural Theology, which took as proof of God’s existence the complexity of living beings. Nature’s design could be used to prove the existence of God. Charles wrote, “I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s Natural Theology: I could almost formerly have said it by heart.”

  He later said that these years at Cambridge were his happiest. His schedule was undemanding, allowing time for foxhunting, pigeon shoots, fishing, exploring the countryside around Cambridge. In the evenings he drank claret and played blackjack, freely spending Dr. Darwin’s money. He joined the Glutton Club, which met for dinners of “birds and beasts which were before unknown to human palate.” The members feasted on hawks, herons—though they disbanded after the owl dinner. His interests included music—he couldn’t carry a tune but greatly enjoyed attending concerts. He also began going to museums and studying art books, another way of learning how to see.

  In his cousin William Darwin Fox, who was older by four years, Darwin found a kindred spirit, almost a second Ras. Fox was on the same career path as Charles, and like him also much happier outdoors than in. Both of their rooms overflowed with stuffed birds, baby chicks, various specimens.

  The competitive collecting of beetles was a national craze, and Darwin became crazed. He hunted for them, tearing bark off dead logs, scooping through swamp gunk, burying a snake and digging it up weeks later to check for insects. Then he’d put his finds in a tin box until he could get back and pin them. He spent hours mounting and catalogui
ng his collection. He even hired assistants to bring him bags of moss scraped off old trees in the hope of finding more rare specimens. Once a friend sketched Darwin riding a beetle, with the caption “Go it Charlie!”

  On one memorable day, ripping off some old bark, he found two rare beetles and grabbed one in each hand: “Then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped one into my mouth. Alas ...”

  The third beetle spewed out a terrible-tasting fluid that burned Charles’s tongue so badly, he spit out the beetle. Two out of the three beetles escaped.

  With better results, he sent his beetle records to the entomologist James Francis Stephens. To Darwin’s delight, Stephens published about thirty of these records in Illustrations of British Entomology. This marked the first appearance of Darwin’s name in print as an author.

  He found a first love in one of his neighbors, Fanny Owen, though her letters revealed she knew perfectly well she was competing with beetles for his attention.

  He began spending a lot of time with John Henslow, a professor who was making botany the most exciting subject at Cambridge. Charles had already heard from Ras about this fascinating teacher. Author of A Catalog of British Plants, Henslow lectured on the chemical properties of plant tissues, plants that could be used in medicine, how plants adapted to different environments, how they were fertilized. His classes included hands-on dissection of plants—so much nicer than cutting into humans, Darwin thought.