by Paul Johnson
CHAPTER TWO
Education and
Self-Education of a Scientist
Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, at The Mount, Shrewsbury, the substantial house his father had built in the early Regency style. It was a vintage year for great men: Also born were Tennyson and Gladstone, and Lincoln arrived the same day as Darwin. Napoléon still strode over Europe like a colossus, and Madison was about to be inaugurated as the fourth president of the United States. But the item from 1809 that would most have interested the adult Darwin was the news that a young naturalist and artist, John James Audubon, had successfully banded pewees near Pittsburgh, proving that migratory birds return to nest to the place where they hatched. This was the kind of experiment dear to Darwin’s heart, and he would have endorsed Audubon’s remarks when he first saw a ringed female pewee lay an egg: “It filled my mind with the same wonder that I feel when I search the heavens for the meaning of all I see.”
Throughout his long life, Darwin was an extremely lucky man. Of all the great scientists in history, he was the most favored by fortune. His genetic inheritance, as we have seen, was magnificent. He had a happy childhood, despite the catastrophe of his mother’s death. He loved and admired his father. He was happy in his father’s house, garden, and fields. The family was harmonious and the servants plentiful, well paid, and friendly. Darwin was born a gentleman in an age when the term had a specific meaning and legal status. His uncle, Josiah Wedgwood II, had bought a prize thousand-acre estate at Maer in Staffordshire, and there Darwin often stayed in childhood and youth, and learned to ride and shoot. Under the game laws, then strict and fiercely enforced, you had to be “qualified” to shoot game. Darwin was, by virtue of his father’s ownership of land. He wrote: “I became passionately fond of shooting & I do not believe that anyone could have shown more zeal for the most holy cause than I did for shooting birds.” He remembered “killing my first snipe, & my excitement was so great that I had much difficulty in reloading my gun from the trembling of my hands.” He became “a very good shot.” At one point, his zeal for shooting became such that his father angrily remarked it was the only thing he cared about. This was not true. Shooting revealed the ambiguity that was one of Darwin’s most marked characteristics. He regarded it as an intellectual activity: “It required so much skill to judge where to find most game & hunt the dogs well.” It also taught him the importance of records: “I kept an exact record of every bird that I shot.” Moreover, from reading Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, he “took much pleasure in watching the habits of birds & even made notes on the subject.” He wondered “why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.” Thus sport nurtured science, and Darwin saw no conflict. Though he gave up shooting for pleasure in his early forties, at no point did he find it anomalous to hunt, catch, kill, and dissect enormous numbers of insects, invertebrates, birds, and animals in the quest for knowledge, despite detesting cruelty in any form and acquiring a positive affection for many of the species he investigated.
Darwin seems to have been a collector from a very early age: “shells, seals, franks, coins & minerals.” He wrote that it is this “passion for collecting” that leads “a man to become a systematic naturalist,” and in his case “was clearly innate as none of my sisters or brother ever had this taste.” His first serious collection was of beetles, and “to give a proof of my zeal,” he one day “saw two rare beetles & seized one in each hand; then I saw a third & new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas it ejected some intensely acrid fluid which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost.”
It was Darwin’s strategy, in writing about himself after he became famous, to emphasize the positive side of his intellectual development as springing from innate qualities and to discount his formal education. He had a year at a primary school before going to Shrewsbury for five years. This ancient school, which in Tudor and early Stuart times had been the best in England, was then run by Dr. Samuel Butler. His grandson, another Samuel, was later to hound Darwin unmercifully in his years of fame, and perhaps for this reason, Darwin claimed he learned nothing of value at his grandfather’s school. This was not true. He acquired a better command of written English than is the fate of most scientists, together with habits of industry and intellectual tidiness. He also developed a strong taste for literature, especially poetry and, not least, Shakespeare, and the recent poems of Scott and Byron. He made many friends among the boys, and he displayed for the first time a gift that he retained all his life, for male friendship. He said, “Some of these boys were rather clever,” but, he added with a hint of satisfaction, “not one of them became in the least distinguished.”
Considering Dr. Robert Darwin’s skill in judging character and intuiting the thoughts of his patients, it is odd that he had no success at all in picking the right training for his son Charles. He first sent him to Edinburgh to qualify as a doctor like himself. Then, after two full sessions, he switched him to Cambridge (Christ’s College) to prepare for ordination. Charles never showed the slightest enthusiasm or aptitude for medical or clerical life. Quite the contrary, in both cases. Still, these were two of the best universities in the world, and Darwin had the means to take the fullest advantage of their opportunities. His father always provided him with plenty of money. Thus, for his beetle hobby, he was able to employ a man in the winter to scrape the moss off old trees and bag it, and to collect rubbish from the hulls of barges from the fens: “Thus I got some very rare species.” Still, he missed a number of chances. In the Edinburgh medical school, he allowed his squeamishness to inhibit his study of dissection, and he never learned the basic scientific principles of it or acquired the dexterity common in expert surgeons. As he spent much of his later life dissecting, this was a serious omission. In addition, he never learned human anatomy. Hatred of this essential but dull, difficult, and exhausting business is the biggest single reason why medical students give up or fail their course, today as then. So Darwin’s omission was not surprising. Nevertheless, ignorance of anatomy was always a handicap in his career. Indeed, his failure at Edinburgh to learn more about the human body was the reason why, as a student of organic life, he was always stronger on flora and fauna than on people. He became a consummate scientific polymath in many ways, but anthropology was his weak subject, and this helps to explain why the Origin of Species is so much better a book than The Descent of Man, and why Darwin came, in effect, almost to a full stop at the height of his career.
Darwin also failed to acquire, as he admits, any skill in drawing, though there were plenty of opportunities, and this made it difficult later for him to produce effective diagrams in his works or visual illustrations to organize parts hard to describe in words. He also admits he failed to compensate by hard study for his natural lack of aptitude in modern languages. This meant he never acquired the habit of automatically reading scientific publications except in English, and it is one reason why he failed to spot Gregor Mendel’s key paper on genetics in 1866 (to be sure, so did most other people). Darwin, thanks to private tuition, mastered Euclid, and he exulted in the pleasure he got from becoming familiar with the process of logical proof. More seriously, however, he failed very largely to progress in mathematics beyond the elementary stages, and this cost him dear. As Galileo observed:
The universe cannot be read until we have learned the language and have become familiar with the characters in which it has been written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other mathematical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word.
It may be said that Darwin was not seeking to comprehend the universe as a whole, but only its organic content. But even there the mathematical aspects were to be recognized as vital in the generation after Darwin’s death. As Francis Crick, who built so strikingly on Darwin�
��s foundation, was to put it, in What Mad Pursuit (1988): “Almost all aspects of [organic] life are engineered at the molecular level, and without understanding molecules we can have only a very sketchy understanding of life itself.”
If Darwin had understood and used mathematics, he might have penetrated to the molecular level and to the genetic dimension that completed his discoveries—and also avoided some serious errors of comprehension, as we shall see. His lack of math, which he shared with his codiscoverer of natural selection, Wallace, was his most serious educational handicap.
Nevertheless, Darwin’s time at Edinburgh and Cambridge was of inestimable value to him, especially at a personal level. It was full of memorable incidents, as when at Edinburgh he attended a meeting of the Royal Society presided over by Sir Walter Scott, or in Cambridge where he saw two body snatchers lynched by a mob, a grisly scene that reinforced the “Priestley fear” in his subconscious. There was one academic exercise in particular that proved invaluable. To get his BA degree at Cambridge, he was obliged to read thoroughly William Paley’s View of the Evidences of Christianity. This work was and still is remarkable not so much because it “proves” that nature is the work of a Supreme Being but because it is a model of deductive logic, step-by-step argument, and not least, clarity of exposition. There is no doubt at all that Darwin learned a great deal from Paley about how exactly to put a lucid, cogent, and sustained case, and that if he had not read and absorbed it, The Origin of Species would have been a much less effective book.
Finally, and most important, these sojourns in high places of learning were vital because of the scholars he met and the relationships he formed with them. It is not considered quite proper to suggest that scientists often progress as much by personal charm as by intellect. But it is so. Darwin is an example. Within the limits he set himself, he was gregarious, and there is overwhelming evidence that people liked him and took to him. He could attract, interest, and above all, charm, when he wished to do so. Moreover, he enjoyed working among the learned at a professional level. He had a natural gift for what we now call networking, and a taste for it too. Edinburgh and Cambridge gave him the opportunity to lay the foundation of an immense range of contacts in the scientific world, and he took full advantage of it.
These included, at Edinburgh, the professor of chemistry, Thomas Hope, and Robert Jameson, professor of natural history. Jameson had founded the Plinean Society, to which students could belong and contribute, and there Darwin delivered his first scientific paper, on the sea mat Flustra, a primitive creature rather like a piece of moss. He also belonged to the Wernerian Natural History Society and took an active part in it. At such bodies, he made friends with the marine biologist Dr. Robert Edmund Grant, the biologist Dr. John Coldstream, and the polymath William Gregory, later a famous scientific writer, all of whom proved useful in due course. In pursuit of Flustra, he went with members of both bodies on scientific expeditions along the eastern Scottish coast. He learned taxidermy from John Edmonstone, a freed slave who had been trained by the famous traveler-naturalist Charles “Squire” Waterton. He heard Audubon lecture on birds. He spent a winter with Robert Edmond Grant, who had taken a house on the Prestonpans shore to study sponges and polyps, and helped him produce a score of scientific papers published in the late 1820s. He filled the first of his mature scientific notebooks. He studied Lamarck assiduously, especially his System of Invertebrate Animals, and became a convert to his system of evolution. The atmosphere at Edinburgh was radical, often wildly so, skeptical, nonconformist, innovative, and challenging of all orthodoxies, and Darwin, in his quiet way, absorbed it fully. The impression he later gave that he wasted his time at medical school was false. He learned a great deal, as well as making scores of contacts.
Darwin’s years at Cambridge were in some ways even more fruitful. Darwin lived well—he could afford, for instance, to pay the boy choristers of King’s College Chapel to sing in his rooms at parties for his friends—and he entertained the scientific dons. Among them was the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, professor of geology, whose superb lectures he attended and whom he was privileged to accompany on a scientific expedition to the Welsh mountains, where he learned the invaluable techniques of spotting rock strata and taking samples. Even more important was the Reverend John Stevens Henslow, formerly professor of mineralogy, now professor of botany and a general scientific polymath. Darwin cultivated him assiduously, and he became in turn devoted to the young man. Darwin said he “took long walks with him most days,” so he was known to the dons as “the man who walks with Henslow.” Darwin said Henslow’s “strongest taste was to draw conclusions from long continued minute observations,” something Darwin learned to emulate. He learned much else about a wide range of scientific disciplines, including the need to take systematic and copious notes. His “intimacy” with Henslow, Darwin wrote, “was an inestimable benefit.”
Moreover, Henslow had wide contacts and used them to favor students he esteemed. At the end of the summer of 1831, he wrote to Darwin saying he had been asked to recommend a young gentleman naturalist to accompany a global voyage by a naval ten-gun brig for scientific purposes. “You are the very man they are in search of.” Darwin, we have noted, was an exceptionally lucky man. This was the biggest stroke of luck of his entire life. Yet it was not just luck. The First Reform Bill was then before Parliament, and the old order was changing. But in 1831, it was still largely intact, and plum appointments went by privileged contacts. Robert FitzRoy, captain of the HMS Beagle, was himself an aristocrat, pushed up to captain at the early age of twenty-seven and now given this excellent assignment, largely because his uncle had been Viscount Castlereagh, the famous foreign secretary. But it was a lonely job, for as captain and commander, he had powers of life and death over the crew and necessarily kept aloof from them. On a long voyage—this was planned for two years and actually took nearly five—such isolation could be fatal, and FitzRoy’s predecessor had committed suicide. What the captain wanted, as his naturalist, was a gentleman companion, with the stress on gentleman, who could share his day cabin and his table. Darwin, as Henslow noted, was “not a finished naturalist,” but well on the way: almost certainly the best-educated student naturalist then at Cambridge. But more important, he had the manners and means of a gentleman. His father supplied him with ample funds, which enabled him to hire Syms Covington as a valet-assistant at £60 a year (then a huge salary for a servant) and to ensure that all his specimens and notes were periodically sent back to England during the long voyage by the safest and most expeditious route. The FitzRoy-Darwin combination was thus a double job, as was underlined by the original ship’s doctor, who expected to act as naturalist, but who discharged himself as soon as the Beagle touched port in South America, disgusted with the setup. But the arrangement worked perfectly. FitzRoy was a man with an incandescent temper who occasionally stormed at his companion (he eventually blew his own brains out), but he was an excellent navigator, quickly saw the point of Darwin, and fitted the ship’s movements to his program of work. Darwin, for his part, was quiet, obsequious, and conciliatory.
Darwin was given only a month to prepare for his voyage. The Beagle left Devonport on December 27, 1831, and returned to England on October 2, 1836. It visited the Cape Verde Islands, various places in Brazil and Argentina, including Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, the Falkland Islands, Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, the Straits of Magellan, Central Chile, Chiloé and the Chonos Islands, the extreme earthquake region of Chile at Valdivia, northern Chile and Peru, the Galápagos Archipelago, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, the coral formations of Keeling Island, and Mauritius. At intervals in the five-year voyage, Darwin was able to spend a total of three years and one month on land, traveling widely, collecting botanical, organic, animal, fossil, metallurgical, and mineral specimens of all kinds and recording his observations of flora, fauna, and human inhabitants. He shot a wide variety of birds and animals, went on an ostrich hunt, studied the effects
of a large-scale earthquake, observed a major volcanic eruption, and visited at length tropical rain forests, high mountains, sierras, pampas and other grasslands, rivers, lakes, and a wide variety of scrub and brushwood areas, as well as scores of native villages, settler towns, mines, and cities.
