Charles Darwin*

by Kathleen Krull

  Whoa.

  As he wrote later, “Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.” For Darwin, reading Malthus was the closest thing he had to a eureka moment. Things started clicking into place. Species were always reproducing beyond the resources available to them. Which individuals would survive, and which wouldn’t? And why?

  Darwin applied what he learned from Malthus to what he already knew about crossbreeding plants and animals. He now printed up a questionnaire about crossbreeding and sent it to everyone he could think of. How did they choose which individuals in a species to breed? What methods did they use for selective breeding?

  Darwin took a long view of the information he received. In nature, purely by chance, were new species created? He began seeing patterns in adaptation. For example, in a litter of rabbits some might be born with longer legs. Assuming that long legs were useful to survival, those rabbits would be the ones to live long enough to mate, and some of their children would inherit their longer legs. Over time, in generation after generation of litters, the long-legged rabbits would be dominant. Short-legged rabbits would die out. Might a new species eventually arise that were like rabbits but with longer legs? Could this pattern hold true for all species? Was this how new species formed?

  Into the D notebook, he wrote about glowworms, cattle, ducks, and Malthus. “There must be some law that whatever organization an animal has, it tends to multiply and IMPROVE on it,” Darwin concluded. And he wrote about Darwins. He interviewed Dr. Darwin about unfamiliar branches of the family tree, looking for traits and stories, adding to those he already knew.

  By E he was referring to “my theory”—through natural selection a species changed over time and developed into a new species.

  Darwin paid several visits to the London Zoo to observe an orangutan, Jenny. Jenny and another recent arrival, a chimpanzee, were among the first members of the ape family that the English had ever seen. Viewers were somewhat shocked to watch Jenny interact with her keeper in ways familiar to anyone who knows a small child. Queen Victoria said later she found Jenny “painfully and disagreeably human.”

  On one visit Darwin observed Jenny’s reactions while he played a harmonica and gave her peppermints to eat and leaves from a lemon verbena plant to smell. To him her behavior as she pouted and whined to get what she wanted was exactly like “a naughty child.” Into a notebook he scribbled, “Man from monkey?”

  The notebooks had many more questions than answers.

  By notebook N he was writing that biology followed natural laws that could be tested and proven, as laws in physics and astronomy were. “We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws,” he pointed out, “but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.” By “special act” he was referring to God’s creation of a fixed world. He knew the general public wasn’t ready to accept his ideas. He had to keep his notebooks secret, even from Ras and his new best friend, Lyell. Though he didn’t take the precautionary step of writing backward, as Leonardo da Vinci had in his notebooks three hundred years earlier, Darwin had similar motives for keeping his ideas to himself.

  Darwin started to have trouble digesting his nightly roast beef. But that didn’t stop him from thinking about his theory, and then thinking about it more. Up until now he had been flailing amid facts; now they were forming patterns. Branching out from alphabetical notebooks, he started writing an essay on the free paper at the posh Athenaeum Club, to which he’d been elected a member at the same time as Charles Dickens.

  He lost another eighteen pounds. He was plagued with stomach pains, vomiting, severe boils, heart palpitations, trembling. The drugs that doctors gave him, like opium, probably made him worse.

  This was the beginning of the long period later known as “Darwin’s Delay,” the years in which he avoided publishing the book about his theory. The delay lasted twenty years. Various factors contributed—he was a master at procrastination; he had a great deal to fear by going public, so he wanted to amass tons of irrefutable examples to prove his theory; and besides, he was busy.

  All of this dwelling on reproduction within a species as the driving force of nature merged with something more personal—his own thoughts of marrying.

  His former girlfriend Fanny had married someone else almost as soon as he left on the Beagle.

  Would a wife add to or detract from his life?

  He was torn. Ras had never married and seemed happy. It wasn’t as if he needed someone to act as a hostess—Ras did that for him, planning dinner parties in his honor. And his time was completely his own.

  Darwin listed the pros and cons of marriage on paper, as if assessing and describing a new kind of beetle. “A nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire” versus giving up traveling to America, going up in a balloon, the “terrible loss of time” away from his studies.

  But adventuring had lost its appeal. At age twenty-nine, he was a bachelor who lived in his armchair, whose main hobby was keeping track of his own ailments.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Confessing a Murder”

  THE URGE TO mate won out. And he didn’t look far for someone to mate with. After calling on her a few times, Darwin chose to marry his first cousin, thirty-year-old Emma Wedgwood, daughter of Uncle Josiah, and a friend since childhood. After the proposal, she felt “bewildered” and he had a headache. But her answer was yes.

  Darwin didn’t want an intimidating wife. Emma, however, was well educated for a woman of her day, could speak four languages, and had even studied piano with the famous composer Frédéric Chopin. Emma was exceedingly pleasant, a natural born caretaker. “I think you will humanize me,” he wrote her, “and soon teach me there is greater happiness than building theories and accumulating facts in silence and solitude.”

  Plus the union kept both their fortunes in the family. Prone to nightmares about being penniless, Darwin felt safe knowing that, if he had a future family to support, Emma’s money meant his lifestyle would never have to change. He could still put all the time he wanted into his studies.

  As for Emma, she called him “the most open, transparent man I ever saw . . . sweet-tempered.” A nice guy. So nice that she could blot out their differences concerning religious faith. Against his father’s advice, he confessed to her his doubts that the Bible’s version of the history of the earth could be taken literally. Emma, a devout Unitarian, calmly decided that while she regretted the “painful void” between them, she could agree to disagree, in a sort of don’t-ask-don’t-tell way.

  After a small wedding in January 1839 at a church near her country estate, they shared sandwiches and a bottle of water on the train to London.

  That same year, Darwin’s journal, popularly known as The Voyage of the Beagle, was published. (It appeared first as one volume in FitzRoy’s account and was so popular that it was then published separately.) In his book, Darwin speculated about those Galápagos finches: “Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.”

  Captain FitzRoy never liked the book—since the voyage he had become even more religious, and he was appalled at Darwin’s science. The two men were becoming increasingly estranged.

  But as a well-written and spellbinding travel book, the Voyage was hugely popular with everyone else and is still read for pleasure today.

  Darwin was working hard, not terribly focused, distracted by his own reproductive success. While living in London, he and Emma had two children, William Erasmus and Anne Elizabeth. He viewed them like a scientist would—a very fond scientist. William was his “little animalcule of a son.” He started drafting a natural history of babies, with detailed notes on his son’s first year. Every little thing about his children fascinated him—the first smile, blinking, what their tears meant, the acquisition of language,
how they reacted when tickled or when Darwin sneezed loudly, when they were naughty (he wrote about it rather than punishing them), how they perfected “the art of screaming” because it was “of service” to them, how they lived in joy and pleasure.

  At thirty-three, Darwin needed to move his growing family. He and Emma looked at the new railroad lines to make sure they picked a place close enough to London to make the round trip regularly. Ras would always keep a bedroom for him on Marlborough Street, but for the rest of his life, Darwin would live at Down House, a country estate in the village of Downe, near Bromley, some sixteen miles outside London.

  For Darwin, Down House, on its eighteen acres of wooded land, was a return to the haven of nature that The Mount in Shrewsbury had been for him. It was remote, with trees and flowers of all kinds, the loud humming of bees, the blackbirds singing. (Twenty years previously, the fossil of a giant lizard had been found only thirty miles from the house, and just that year the word “dinosaur” had been coined to describe such creatures.)

  His first change was to lower the road along the house and plant bushes for privacy. In his study, behind a curtain in the corner, was a nook where he could throw up in private. He positioned a mirror outside the window so he could see visitors coming and flee, and also so he could see the mailman coming. Taking full advantage of the superb British postal system, which delivered mail to his neighborhood as many as four times a day, he sought information from all over the world. He wrote letters, lots of letters, to other naturalists, asking nicely, in flowery language, for help. Some 14,000 letters to and from him survive; more have been lost.

  Eventually the Darwins had ten children, although in an era of high child mortality, only seven survived to adulthood. Victorian fathers were supposed to be remote and stern, but to the surprise of just about everyone, Darwin was a dad who enjoyed children. He kissed them, bathed them, tickled them, danced them on his knee while singing, stroked their hair as he walked by, listened intently to their concerns. They were allowed the run of the house for romping and games, and they loved hanging out in his study, with its jars of worms, beetles, and spiders. He used pictures in his science books to entertain them. He would tell them stories or let them write their stories on the backs of old paper. They could run in for art supplies or whatever they needed—except when they needed bandages for cut fingers. These they would get when he went out for a walk, because they knew how much blood upset him.

  The light of his life was his daughter Annie. With pure joy at living, she wrinkled her nose when laughing, was musical and loved dancing, and would play with his hair for half an hour, making it “beautiful.” Like him she was very neat—she loved looking up words in dictionaries, identifying colors, sewing little things for her collections of dolls. To him she radiated happiness and “animal spirits.” He thought ahead to how much she would cheer him and Emma up in old age.

  Sometimes Annie danced ahead of him on the daily walks taken with his fox terrier, Polly. Thinking endlessly, he took a path called the Sandwalk along a woods, cut off from the sight of any building, just forest and valleys. He would pile stones at the turn of the path and knock one off at each turn. Five turns meant he’d walked his quota of half a mile. The children could hear the click of his walking stick and the stones being knocked off.

  In this way, the years passed.

  Baby steps became longer strides. In 1842, in between writing up his Beagle zoology and geology projects, Darwin wrote the first draft of his evolutionary theory, his working hypothesis, thirty-five pages, not for publication. He was starting to use the term “a natural means of selection”—natural as opposed to man-managed breeding practices.

  “At last gleams of light have come,” he wrote in 1844 in a famous letter to his friend Joseph Hooker, “and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. . . . I think I have found out (here’s a presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.”

  “Like confessing a murder”—so great was his dread of going public. He also feared upsetting Emma. Her biggest concern was always that his religious doubts might separate them in the afterlife. She wrote him an eloquent letter about this that he read over and over, writing at the bottom that he had kissed it and cried over it.

  But it was to Emma that he gave the second draft of this essay. He revised and expanded his original essay into 230 pages in 1844, showed it to no one, and wrote Emma in detail as to how she should have it published in the event of his death. With his customary modesty, he wrote: “I have just finished my sketch of my species theory. If, as I believe . . . my theory is true, and if it be accepted even by one competent judge, it will be a considerable step in science.” He put the letter and essay into a brown folder and stuck it on a shelf.

  It was a case of drastic avoidance.

  Then a bombshell struck. A book called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was published anonymously that same year. Like Darwin, the author believed that all forms of life had descended from a few much simpler beings. He even went so far as to suggest that the ape might be man’s ancestor. The author used many of the same sources as Darwin, such as Lyell, and had some similar ideas, but one of his conclusions was quite different—he thought God had provided a plan that nature followed as it evolved. The author never revealed himself publicly, but he was Robert Chambers, a Scottish journalist. Born with twelve fingers and twelve toes, he had a deep interest in abnormalities, which in turn prompted him to theorize about how humans were created.

  The book provoked an uproar. Most scientists looked down on it as the work of a “dabbler.” Darwin’s old professor Sedgwick trashed it as being so crazy it must have been written by a woman. Still, it played to a huge new interest in popular science and was a blockbuster that every smart person—including Florence Nightingale and Abraham Lincoln—was reading.

  Glued to a copy at the British Museum Library, Darwin thought “Mr. Vestiges” made many mistakes and was too bold in his leaps. His research was slipshod, all secondhand—he hadn’t traveled much and thus had no firsthand observation or evidence to back up his ideas. It was all speculation.

  The book gave Darwin a shock—other naturalists were forming ideas about the development of new species. Still, that didn’t mean he was ready to take the giant step of publishing his own book.

  He thought vaguely about moving his family to “the middle states of North America”—the terrain sounded exotic to him. Instead, for the next fifteen years, he hardly left home, gathering as many facts as humanly possible that would buttress his theory. Delaying, delaying, delaying.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Yet More Delay

  FOR EIGHT YEARS Darwin threw himself into what seems like an odd scientific detour from his species book. He turned his microscope and dissecting tools to . . . barnacles, those humble sea creatures found clinging to rocks or the bottoms of boats. They may not sound exciting, but as he found out, “Truly the schemes and wonders of nature are illimitable.” It was already known that barnacles were hermaphrodites—both male and female. But Darwin was finding all kinds of strange forms, like a male with two sexual organs, males that appeared to live inside of females—forms that seemed to show intermediate stages between male and female.

  A family tragedy interrupted his work. In 1849, all three of his daughters got scarlet fever, and his beloved Annie never regained her health. She died in 1851 at the age of ten, probably from tuberculosis. Emma and Charles were devastated. He tried to console himself by writing a ten-page memorial to her, about all the qualities he had treasured, most of all the way “she held herself upright, and often threw her head a little backwards, as if she defied the world in her joyousness.” The sadness of her early death haunted him for the rest of his days.

  In eight—yes, eight—years of work on barnacles, looking at and dissecting some 10,000 specimens, Darwin was able to show that slightly changed bod
y parts served different functions to meet new conditions. He sensed some of his friends were laughing at him. But the work did fit in with his species book, after all. The variations in barnacles showed what evolution could look like, that nothing was constant, that all species have come from simpler forms that were both male and female. And in 1853 the first of his four volumes on barnacles earned him the Royal Society’s Royal Medal. This formally established his reputation as a biologist, beefing up his credentials for publishing what was to come.

  Darwin claimed he lost two of his barnacle years to illness—boils, insomnia, a “swimming head,” what we today might call panic attacks. Stomach problems were common, even fashionable, among Victorian intellectuals. But Darwin’s stomach took the prize—throbbing worse than ever, with spells of vomiting and extreme flatulence that lasted for weeks.

  Historians still debate what was ailing him. The arsenic he used to preserve specimens may have poisoned him, or perhaps the huge doses of a toxic laxative prescribed by doctors were to blame. It could have been some baffling disease inherited from his mother, who died so young. He could have picked up a parasite from his trip around the world. His seasickness could have been mysteriously and permanently reactivated, with a vengeance. Did he have allergies or lactose intolerance? Was he a serious hypochondriac? He probably wasn’t helped by all the coffee he drank and snuff he took.

  If he had been a woman he might have been diagnosed as a hysteric. A man acutely sensitive to criticism, Darwin knew his theory was in for a ton of it. Perhaps his worries about his species book were manifesting themselves as physical symptoms. Or perhaps the symptoms were a useful way to avoid social life and concentrate on his work. Or a way to get Emma’s full attention, since she was always quick to set aside other duties to nurse her husband through any bout of sickness.